Yeltsin

CHAPTER FIVE Megalopolis

Boris Yeltsin was not going to count in the main game of Soviet politics unless he relocated from the fringes of the system to the metropole. Did he want to? He denies it in his memoirs: “I never had the dream or so much as the wish to work in Moscow.” He had received a series of proposals to resettle there, “some of them” as minister in the central government, and turned them all down. A son of Sverdlovsk and the Urals, he wanted to stay with his friends and colleagues and loathed how Muscovites created prettified façades, Potemkin villages, and looked down their noses at country cousins.¹ His Sverdlovsk patron, Yakov Ryabov, spins it differently. Sverdlovskers frequently moved to Moscow and to other regions, and thought it “a normal part of the selection and assignment of cadres.” Yeltsin studied with interest several offers in the provinces and the capital before he was lifted to obkom secretary in 1975, and used them to importune Ryabov to advance his career locally.² He also, Ryabov claims, felt envious of some of the promotions given to others—for example, Nikolai Ryzhkov, the director of Uralmash, who moved to a high ministerial position in 1975.³ Information is lacking on the jobs Yeltsin may have turned down after 1975. If he did so, it was not out of a refusal to leave Sverdlovsk.

As a reputable regional administrator, Yeltsin was a surefire candidate for inclusion in any effort to revivify the Soviet leadership. Generational kinetics bolstered the case for him. In November 1976 only three of seventy-two first secretaries in RSFSR regions were younger than he, and he was ten years younger than the average fifty-five-year-old provincial leader. By January 1985 he was at the median in seniority—thirty-six officials had been chosen earlier than he and thirty-five later—but still five years more youthful than the average first secretary, whose age was now up to fifty-nine.⁴ In that way, he offered an attractive combination of combat-hardened experience and energy.

Yeltsin’s rise out of Sverdlovsk came in three steps in 1985. All were questioned by Muscovites with political clout. Personalities and niggling jealousies, not grand visions of reform, were behind it. There were to be consequences, however.

The change to change in the USSR started in the abbreviated Kremlin reign of Yurii Andropov, the onetime KGB chairman who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 and died of kidney failure in February 1984. Andropov sounded the alarm about the regime’s problems and tried to inculcate “order and discipline” in the bureaucracy and the workforce. His disciplinarian line was in those days very much to the liking of Yeltsin, who was to voice “the highest and the best opinion” of him.⁵ One may conjecture also that Yeltsin’s grizzled supporter in the Politburo, Andrei Kirilenko, expounded his qualities to Andropov before Kirilenko’s retirement in late 1982.

In December 1983 Andropov, bedridden in the hospital, had a conversation about Yeltsin with Yegor Ligachëv, the new organizational secretary of the Central Committee. Andropov had selected Ligachëv, a straitlaced Siberian partocrat who had been on the outs with Brezhnev, on the advice of his lieutenant, Mikhail Gorbachev. By Ligachëv’s testimony, Andropov instructed him to go to Sverdlovsk and “have a look at” the local strongman. Ligachëv visited on January 17–21, 1984, inspecting farms and factories and attending the oblast party conference. He was smitten: “I will not conceal it: The liveliness of Yeltsin’s relations with people, his vigor, and his decisiveness appealed to me. It was obvious that many had heartfelt respect for him.”⁶ Andropov’s assistant for economic policy, Arkadii Vol’skii, remembered Ligachëv proposing to Andropov that they hand Yeltsin the construction department of the CPSU Secretariat, the Soviet-wide equivalent of what he oversaw in Sverdlovsk from 1968 to 1975. Andropov was for it, with the sidelong compliment that Yeltsin was “a good builder”—even though he had been a multifunctional party prefect since 1976. Andropov probably saw Yeltsin as fit for no more than the departmental slot, but Ligachëv saw it as probationary and leading to bigger things.⁷

Yeltsin’s appointment to the Central Committee apparatus was on hold during the interregnum of the Brezhnev epigone Konstantin Chernenko. Kremlin workhorses like Dmitrii Ustinov, the defense minister who forced out Yakov Ryabov in 1979, may have had it in for Yeltsin. If so, Marshal Ustinov’s death in December 1984 was well-timed. Chernenko died of emphysema three months later, and Yeltsin participated in the Central Committee plenum of March 11, 1985, which made Gorbachev general secretary of the party.

Gorbachev was initially not a Yeltsin fan. He knew little of him, and “What I did know made me leery.” They made their acquaintance in the two years after Yeltsin became Sverdlovsk first secretary in late 1976. Gorbachev had been first secretary in the breadbox province of Stavropol since 1970, and they swapped Stavropol foodstuffs for metals and lumber from the Urals. As Central Committee secretary for the Soviet farm sector from 1978 to 1985, Gorbachev crossed swords with Yeltsin two or three times over Yeltsin’s surliness with emissaries of Moscow. At a plenum of the obkom to discuss a Central Committee memorandum that took a swipe at the Sverdlovsk livestock industry, Yeltsin exchanged words with Gorbachev’s representative, Ivan Kapustyan. “I noted for myself,” writes Gorbachev in his memoirs, Life and Reforms, “that the Sverdlovsk secretary reacted inadequately toward remarks directed at him.” Besides, Gorbachev had seen Yeltsin wobbly on his feet in the Soviet parliament; from hearsay, he ascribed it to a drinking spree.⁸ To hear Gorbachev tell it, Ligachëv did not need to be asked by Andropov to go for the look-see in Sverdlovsk. He volunteered to do it and phoned Gorbachev late at night to tell him, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, this is our kind of person, we have to pick him!”⁹

When Gorbachev and Ligachëv did summon Yeltsin to Moscow in the first week of April 1985, their prize enlistee gummed up the works by playing hard to get. As Yeltsin says in Confession on an Assigned Theme, he spurned the offer relayed by Vladimir Dolgikh, a junior member of the Kremlin leadership. He relented only when Ligachëv stepped in the morning after and invoked party discipline.¹⁰ Yeltsin’s liking for Sverdlovsk and dislike of Moscow, where he had never lived and had almost no friends, argued against the move. He was assuaged some by his younger daughter, Tatyana, and his grandson, Boris, being in Moscow and by the willingness of elder daughter Yelena to move with them. As Tatyana said in a 2001 interview, her mother was to be homesick but not her father: “For him, the principal thing is work. Where he works is where he makes his home.”¹¹ The issue was what Yeltsin would work at in Moscow. He had ruled the roost in Sverdlovsk for most of a decade, and two of his three predecessors in the obkom, Kirilenko in 1962 and Ryabov in 1976, had been appointed a Central Committee secretary out of Sverdlovsk. (Nikolai Ryzhkov was made a secretary in November 1982, seven years after leaving Sverdlovsk, taking Kirilenko’s slot.) To Yeltsin, that, or at the lower limit, a position as deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union, was his due, and one of the CPSU’s economic departments, further down the pecking order, was not.

It was unhelpful, as historians have not appreciated, that Yeltsin already had doubts about Gorbachev. Stylistically, the two were oil and water. Gorbachev, from the sun-drenched plains bordering the Caucasus Mountains, had become a communist in his early twenties, received a law degree at Moscow State University (the oldest and most prestigious university in Russia), made his career in the Komsomol and in general party leadership, and was married to a Marxist philosopher. Yeltsin, from the frigid and rock-ribbed Urals, entered the CPSU late, studied at a provincial polytechnic, was a production specialist, and married another engineer. Gorbachev was sedentary and balding; Yeltsin was a half-foot taller, athletic, and had a full head of hair. Gorbachev was garrulous and even-tempered; Yeltsin was spare with words and irascible. Gorbachev’s favorite authors were the Romantic writer and poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), the Futurist bard of the Bolshevik Revolution who died a suicide; Yeltsin preferred Chekhov, Pushkin, and Sergei Yesenin (1895–1925), a poet who wrote of love and village life, married five times (including once to Isadora Duncan), and who also died by his own hand. In music, Gorbachev’s taste ran to symphonies and Italian opera; for Yeltsin, it was folk songs and pop tunes.¹²

After Gorbachev moved to Moscow as Central Committee secretary, Yeltsin found him controlling and patronizing, although he kept lines of communication open. Gorbachev hailed workmates in the Russian language’s familiar second person singular, ty; Yeltsin winced at this liberty and always used the more correct plural, vy.¹³ As we saw in the last chapter, Gorbachev for Yeltsin connoted overcentralization on questions such as locally manufactured farm machinery. At a deeper level, Yeltsin had qualms about Gorbachev’s grasp of the issues and his ability to lead the country. “Notes of disesteem for Gorbachev” wafted through his patter at meetings of the Sverdlovsk party bureau.¹⁴ Stoking Yeltsin’s unhappiness was his belief that Gorbachev, his exact contemporary, had overachieved. Stavropol was known for its wheat farms and its mineral-waters spas, at the ritziest of which, in Kislovodsk and Pyatigorsk, Gorbachev had been innkeeper to the holidaying Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Stavropol had half of Sverdlovsk’s population and, as Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs, was “significantly inferior” to it economically.¹⁵ But Gorbachev had come to Moscow as a secretary in 1978 and by 1985 was general secretary—and Gorbachev had not deigned to phone in April 1985 to recruit Yeltsin.

Nor was there any love lost with Ligachëv. Eleven years older than Yeltsin and a party member since 1944, he had a dossier replete in propaganda and personnel work; his service in the party apparatus dated from 1949, nineteen years before Yeltsin’s and four years before the end of the Stalin era. So many of Ligachëv’s choices as CPSU director of personnel, Yeltsin groaned to Ryabov, were from backwaters, “provinces not comparable to ours.”¹⁶ With 900,000 people, Tomsk, where Ligachëv was first secretary for seventeen years, was the fifty-eighth most populous Russian region; Sverdlovsk was fourth and even Stavropol was fourteenth.¹⁷ The January 1984 reconnaissance trip to Sverdlovsk that so gratified Ligachëv only got Yeltsin’s dander up. The one thing he had heard, Yeltsin informed the obkom secretaries before Ligachëv flew in, was that Ligachëv fancied buckwheat porridge for breakfast; they were to feed him well, show him around the oblast, and not darken Yeltsin’s door until the oblast’s scheduled party conference later in the week.¹⁸ True to his word, Yeltsin met Ligachëv at the airport and told him he would be too busy to squire him on his rounds, but looked forward to some conversations and to seeing Ligachëv at the conference. Several days later, informed that Ligachëv had shared tips on sowing and harvesting at a local kolkhoz, Yeltsin chortled that everyone should take the Trans-Siberian to Tomsk to “see how great things are there.”¹⁹ He at one point compelled the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk gorkom, Sergei Kadochnikov, to take “this idiot” off his hands, as Ligachëv had demanded to know why the city’s storefronts were not painted as nicely as in Tomsk.²⁰ The day of the oblast party conference, Ligachëv, a saturnine Yeltsin at his side, queried Sverdlovskers in front of the opera house about what they made of their first secretary.²¹ Not disheartened by Yeltsin’s petulance—possibly even heartened by it, since here was a man who put business before public relations—Ligachëv led him to believe he would soon be reassigned to Moscow at an appropriate grade.²²

Yeltsin was crestfallen when it sank in that he was to be a department head, a subaltern. He arrived untypically late at the Sverdlovsk House of Soviets for the Monday planning session of the obkom bureau on April 8. He had been detained by a red-eye flight from Moscow, where he got the details and the most fugitive of audiences with Gorbachev.²³ He had an aide fetch a pencil and cracked it in three, as was his habit when peeved. He squinted at the group. “Yeltsin said, ‘Do you know who is sitting there [in Moscow]? They are doddering half-wits [staryye nedoumki]…. We have to chase them away.’ We all froze and blanched…. We could see what it was about: the first secretary of such an oblast was being given the position of head of a department…. He said it right out.”²⁴ Everyone in those chairs understood that his contempt encompassed not only the geriatric Brezhnevites but Gorbachev, Ligachëv, and the arriviste group. All it would have taken to derail his career was one telephone call to Moscow from the local KGB chairman, Yurii Kornilov—the person Yakov Ryabov thought tattled on him in 1979—or any other person on the bureau. That none was made is testament to Yeltsin’s hold on the grandees of Sverdlovsk.

This tempest in a teapot rings true in context. In the estimation of Yeltsin, the supreme leaders had been exposed as poor judges of talent and tepid agents of change. He left for Moscow with a two-ton chip on his shoulder.

On Friday, April 12, 1985, Yeltsin reported for work at the Central Committee enclosure on Old Square, down the block from the Spasskii Gate of the Kremlin. The party center’s construction department had ten sections and about a hundred staff, a comedown from twice that many in the Sverdlovsk obkom. Yeltsin’s attention as head went to a housecleaning of personnel and to flagging projects to lay pipelines and build housing for workers in the west Siberian oil patch. Gorbachev was content. The pickings in the CPSU apparatus were slim: “We were looking everywhere to ‘spy out’ people who were active, unhesitating, and responsive to new things. Not too many of them were nearby, in the upper stratum. Yeltsin impressed me.”²⁵

Boris and Naina were issued a nomenklatura apartment at 54 Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street, in a congested quarter of the downtown near the Belorussia Station. Its windows looked out at Transformation of the Savior, a long-closed Old Believers monastery. There the Yeltsins opened their doors to Tatyana, grandson Boris, and Tatyana’s second husband, Leonid Dyachenko. Since graduating from the university, Tatyana had been working at Salyut, a closed military institute where her job was to track space vehicles in orbit. Yelena and her family lived with the rest for a year or two and then went to party-supplied housing a short distance away.²⁶

Before three months had lapsed, Gorbachev was happy enough with Yeltsin’s labors to put him up for the title Yeltsin had coveted in April: secretary of the Central Committee for construction and capital investment. Questions came up at the Politburo on June 29 from Nikolai Tikhonov, Brezhnev’s comrade from pre–World War II Ukraine whom he had made prime minister of the Soviet Union in 1980. The octogenarian Tikhonov, born one year before Yeltsin’s father, demanded to know his qualifications for a secretaryship. Gorbachev rattled off the Yeltsin résumé and emphasized his energy, experience, and inside-out knowledge of the construction industry. “Somehow,” sniffed Tikhonov, “I don’t have a feel for him.” Ligachëv rushed to Yeltsin’s aid, explaining that he had gotten off to a fast start in Moscow and had been doing the rounds of the ministries, where “people have reached out to him.” Vladimir Dolgikh, the Central Committee secretary for the whole heavy-industrial sector and Yeltsin’s supervisor since April, said Yeltsin had shown he could work satisfactorily with central bureaucrats and regional party officials: “Having gotten to know him better, I have not noticed any weak spots.” Mikhail Solomentsev, the head of the party’s disciplinary arm, the Control Commission of the Central Committee, added a flaccid endorsement: “Comrade Yeltsin… is going to grow. He has all the right attributes: a good education and tempering as a civil engineer. This is a person with a future.” Another elderly member, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, expressed support. Tikhonov pulled in his horns and the Politburo consented to the designation, which was approved by Central Committee plenum on July 1, 1985.²⁷

Yeltsin took the secretaryship as his due. Still running the construction department, he was relieved that he no longer communicated with the administrative and political summit through a go-between, which had been for him “a severe trial.” All spring he had fidgeted at meetings of department heads where he was meant to write down every pearl Dolgikh dropped. Other than a tour of the oil boomtowns of Tyumen province with Gorbachev in September 1985 and the odd meeting, his only communication with number one was by the Kremlin’s high-frequency telephone line.²⁸

It was the third promotion that lofted Yeltsin into the political stratosphere. On Tuesday, December 24, 1985, the Moscow gorkom (city committee) of the CPSU, the relative of the Sverdlovsk obkom, installed him as its first secretary. Gorbachev, who moved the resolution on behalf of the Politburo, had been weighing the move since July, when he had Yeltsin promoted to Central Committee secretary: “I was ‘trying him out for size’ for Moscow.”²⁹

In Confession, Yeltsin writes that the first he heard about the Moscow opening was at the Politburo meeting that discussed it and that he was reluctant to take it, offered the names of alternative candidates, and agreed only out of regard for party discipline. Gorbachev, Yeltsin recounts, said he wanted him to take the job. “For me, this was a bolt from the blue. I stood up and spoke out about the inappropriateness of such a decision.” He was a builder, an unassuming construction engineer, and would contribute more as a Central Committee secretary. “And also I did not know cadres so well in Moscow, so it would be difficult for me to work in the position.” But, Yeltsin says chastely, Gorbachev pressed the case. “The conversation in the Politburo was not simple… for me. Again [as in April], they said to me that party discipline applied and they knew better where I would be of most use to the party. In general, once again puzzling over it, understanding full well that the Moscow party organization could not be left in such a state, and throwing out suggestions as I went about whom it would be better to send there, I agreed.”³⁰

Most of this is to be taken with a grain of salt. We know that Yeltsin and a Sverdlovsk confrère compared notes on the Moscow job a few days before the Politburo meeting. On that occasion, Yeltsin was champing at the bit and agreed with the suggestion that “for the second time only the Urals can save Moscow”—the first being in World War II, when munitions factories were evacuated there and it became an arsenal for the country.³¹ The transcript in the archives for the Politburo session of December 23 shows unequivocally that Yeltsin took the change in stride and said nothing about other likely appointees. Gorbachev was quoted, in the tradition of the spoken word taking precedence over the written, as having talked the position over with him. The only other members who spoke on the motion, all briefly and all in favor, were Gromyko, now head of the executive board of the Soviet parliament; Solomentsev of the control commission; Vitalii Vorotnikov, the prime minister of the RSFSR and its representative on the Politburo; and Viktor Grishin, the incumbent Moscow leader.

Gorbachev opened with word that he had received a letter of resignation from Grishin and wanted him to be given an honorific post as adviser to Gromyko:

The retirement of Grishin from the Politburo and Yeltsin’s shedding of his duties in the Secretariat were to be straightened out at the next plenum of the Central Committee. Grishin was given a minute to offer unctuous thanks to Gorbachev, and then all eyes turned to Yeltsin:

At 8.7 million people, Yeltsin’s new domain was the megalopolis of the USSR. Moscow was, as Gorbachev said, the hub of government, business, education, science, and culture—in the Soviet constellation of things, it was Washington, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles rolled into one. Unlike other Soviet cities, it answered to the central authorities and not to the province around it. Its party boss was the senior local politico in the power structure and sat on the highest councils of the CPSU. Among the major figures who had held its first secretaryship in the past were Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Nikita Khrushchev. The office building of the Moscow party committee was 6 Old Square, cheek by jowl with the Central Committee reception at 4 Old Square; the two had been built around 1910 as matching luxury apartment houses for the Moscow bourgeoisie. Yeltsin was to make it onto the second tier of the Politburo as a candidate (nonvoting) member on February 18, 1986, which was when he officially left the Central Committee Secretariat so as to concentrate on Moscow. Moving up from a Volga sedan to a ZIL-115 limousine, he was now one of the fifteen or twenty most powerful people in the second most powerful country in the world.³³ Under Brezhnev-era understandings on continuity in office, he would have occupied it carefree for two decades.

Control of Moscow was as sensitive an issue as any in Soviet politics in 1985–86. Viktor Grishin, a phlegmatic, half-educated mainstay of the Brezhnev Politburo now in his seventies, had been its first secretary since 1967 and had promoted the capital under his hand as the “model communist city.” His authority had been sapped by a string of scandals, exposed by Ligachëv and others, alleging falsification and thievery in Moscow’s trade and housing networks. Grishin sealed his fate in 1984–85 with an inapt play to present himself as the deathbed pick of Chernenko for general secretary.³⁴

The selection of Yeltsin to dislodge the antediluvian Grishin was, once again, contested. The disapproval came this time not from a relic of the past like Tikhonov but from the likes of Nikolai Ryzhkov, the youngish technocrat who, with Gorbachev behind him, had supplanted Tikhonov as Soviet prime minister in September 1985. Ryzhkov, born in 1929 in Ukraine, was well acquainted with Boris Yeltsin. A UPI alumnus who made his career in Sverdlovsk, he had been director of Uralmash, the Urals Heavy Machinery Works, and sat on the oblast party committee from 1971 to 1975, when Yeltsin was head of the obkom construction department. Although Yeltsin had personal respect for him and the two talked civilly until 1990, Ryzhkov thought Yeltsin was egocentric and quarrelsome and that, as head of department, he had improperly “commanded” Uralmash to carry out tasks the party apparatus wanted done.³⁵ Not being on the Politburo until some weeks after Yeltsin was brought to Moscow, Ryzhkov was out of the loop on that decision. Now that he was chairman of the government and a full member of the Politburo, he could not be circumnavigated. In a colloquy at Old Square before the December 23 meeting, Gorbachev and Ligachëv asked him if he approved of Yeltsin being made the Moscow party chief. Ryzhkov did not mince words. Yeltsin, he warned, while well and good for a party department or one of the construction ministries, could not be entrusted with a more sensitive, political mission. Yeltsin was by nature cut out for brawls. “He will chop wood,” said Ryzhkov, using a rural maxim as warning, “and it will be your elbows that will smart.” Not wanting a fight, he agreed to keep mum in the Politburo unless a fellow member asked his opinion, which none was to do. Some years later, Gorbachev would admit to him that he rued the day he snubbed Ryzhkov’s advice about Yeltsin.³⁶

Ryzhkov’s doubts were about Yeltsin’s character and style, not about policy or obeisance to the regime. No one, not even Yeltsin, saw him as a prospective apostate and leader of the opposition. In December 1985, like Ryabov in his day, Gorbachev considered Yeltsin a force he could tame. Yeltsin knew the terms of the bargain: “I understood perfectly that I was being used to knock down the Grishin team.”³⁷

But Ryzhkov was not the only queasy one. Yevgenii Razumov, the deputy head of the Secretariat’s personnel department, had known Yeltsin since 1976, when he was the Politburo’s representative at the plenum of the Sverdlovsk obkom that confirmed Yeltsin as first secretary. He is said to have spoken out against all three of Yeltsin’s 1985 promotions.³⁸ Anatolii Luk’yanov, the then head of the Central Committee’s general department, says that when Moscow for Yeltsin was under review, he received many letters from Sverdlovsk lambasting Yeltsin and saying “you will weep” if he were to be given a lofty position.³⁹

One issue that did not harm Yeltsin’s chances was his physical condition. Ligachëv in early 1985 had Yevgenii Chazov, the chief of the Kremlin medical service, do a briefing on it, saying he had heard that it was poor (Dolgikh said the same to Chazov). Chazov gave him a clean bill of health.⁴⁰ Alcohol would have been one of the subjects covered. Luk’yanov has noted that “in Russia nobody is ever hired or fired exclusively on the basis of his attitude toward alcohol,”⁴¹ but there were limits to this leniency. Ligachëv, Yeltsin’s protector in 1985, was a teetotaler and, with Solomentsev, conceived the “dry law” of May 1985, the short-lived attempt to curb drunkenness and alcoholism among the citizenry. Ligachëv said to friends in the 1990s that Yeltsin did not touch a drop on his trip to Sverdlovsk in 1984 and no excess was ever in evidence.⁴² Had Yeltsin been a problem drinker, there would have been no invitation to Moscow or its party committee.

The Moscow position was an opportune outlet for Yeltsin’s urban and regional expertise, hankering for recognition, and love of a good fight. As citadel of the Soviet regime, the city stood for all that was amiss with communism and for its potential for redemption through reform. For a month after December 24, Yeltsin galloped through its factories, architectural monuments, and housing projects. His slow-ripening disaffection was giving way to political wanderlust and an itch to speak “the bitter truth” instead of “the sweet lie,” as he had put it on Sverdlovsk television in 1982. He committed wholeheartedly to the reform project and was determined to make his mark on it, repressing any reservations he had about Gorbachev as an individual. As Aleksandr Korzhakov, a former attendant to Brezhnev and Andropov assigned to Yeltsin by the Ninth Directorate of the KGB as one of his three bodyguards, recollected, Yeltsin was “the sincerest member of the party” in cleaving to the general course of perestroika. He “tried harder than the other party bosses to change life for the better.”⁴³

On January 24, 1986, Yeltsin surveyed Moscow’s woes in a stentorian two-hour report to its party conference, held in the glittering convention hall of the Soviet trade unions—the place where Soviet leaders from Lenin to Chernenko had lain in state and Stalin’s show trials were held in the 1930s. Yeltsin wove his points into a parable of broader import. Under Grishin and Brezhnev, the city had been “infected by window dressing, an overemphasis on successes, and a hushing up of shortcomings [through] cooking the books… [and] fakery.” So inveterate was the illness, he said, that even calls for improvement “have been to a great extent perceived formulaically… lamely, at times cravenly.” “There may be some who think these judgments sound indelicate,” Yeltsin added, but “they had to come out.”⁴⁴ Grishin, still a member of the Politburo, sat with a poker face on the podium, within spitting distance of Yeltsin. He did not ask to speak in selfdefense : “This is how we were raised, not to contradict the opinion of the [leadership], which was where the assertions of the keynote speaker [Yeltsin] were coming from.”⁴⁵ He never grasped that the Yeltsin and Gorbachev messages might be appreciably different. Grishin was to lose his advisory post in 1987 and died in 1992.

The words from the Moscow soapbox were the talk of the town. Yeltsin’s speech was a “strong fresh wind” for the party, Gorbachev told him. The general secretary, Yeltsin adds, said this “without an approving smile and with a blank look on his face.”⁴⁶ “From that moment,” says Anatolii Chernyayev, the perspicacious foreign-policy aide to Gorbachev from 1985 to 1991, “dates [Yeltsin’s] glory.” He wrote in his diary that “in spirit, in vocabulary, and in approaches” the speech was putting forth “new norms of life and activity” for the regime. Chernyayev noticed lines at newsstands for that day’s Moskovskaya pravda, the Moscow newspaper that carried the text.⁴⁷

Yeltsin on February 26, 1986, regaled the delegates to the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the whole CPSU. Orthodox in some ways, heterodox in others, his missionary speechifying broadened the discourse about Soviet reform by flogging “the infallibility of officialdom,” its “special blessings” (material privileges), and the smothering of innovation by an “inert stratum of time servers with party cards.” Yeltsin was the first spokesman at this level to propose some revision to political structures (“periodic accountability” of leaders from the general secretary on down) and to say that the regime’s very continuance depended on disinfecting changes taking hold. In his best line, he also gave the national audience a taste of the theatricality so well known in Sverdlovsk. Why had he not been as forthright at the last party congress in 1981? “I can answer and answer sincerely. I did not then have enough courage and political experience.”⁴⁸ By inference, he now had both.

The priority in Moscow was a cadres shakeup. “Conservatism has gone way too far among us,” Yeltsin fumed before several thousand agitprop workers, officials who propagated the party line in the media and the education system, at the House of Political Enlightenment on April 11, 1986. “The city authorities have been playing make-believe [zanimalis’ pokazukhoi]: ‘We know what we are doing, everything is A-plus here, we are the tops in the world, there is no need to wash Moscow’s dirty laundry in public.’ Those who keep on thinking this way should vacate their places and clear out.”⁴⁹ Many did. His first week as viceroy, Yeltsin gave Vladimir Promyslov, who had been mayor since Khrushchev’s day and was politically independent of Grishin, until noon the day after to leave. When Promyslov stalled for time, Yeltsin telephoned him and “suggested that he depart the easy way and not the hard way”; twenty minutes later, Promyslov had quit. To succeed him, Yeltsin tapped Valerii Saikin, the director of the ZIL Works, the biggest auto plant in the USSR; he had to talk Gorbachev out of appointing Saikin Soviet minister of the automobile industry.⁵⁰ In twenty-two months, Yeltsin retired all of the Grishin-appointed secretaries of the gorkom, two-thirds of the raion first secretaries, and, with Saikin, about 90 percent of the leaders in the Promyslov municipal machine. The replacements, better trained technically and up to twenty-five years younger, were often plucked from nonstandard channels, particularly, as in Sverdlovsk, from the ranks of factory management. Yeltsin, an interloper in the capital, had to rely on locals for personnel advice, but he did not always take it: “Like a wild animal, he had a feel for any imprecision, for any falseness in tonality, and was always on his guard…. If he asked you whom to appoint to some post and you gave a name right away, before you knew it that person would be appointed. If you said you needed to think about it, he would set to thinking himself whether to make the appointment or not.”⁵¹

He was in almost as big a rush to tackle policy problems. Often it came down to what Yeltsin had tried out in Sverdlovsk, such as youth housing complexes, the City Day festival (the first in September 1987), and street fairs. On other issues, his preferred remedy was an action bundle linked to numbered targets and deadlines, to emphasize the urgency: twenty-six “multipurpose programs” for socioeconomic issues; letters to forty-two central agencies laying down the law on industrial automation and manufacture of consumer goods; thirty-nine superfluous research institutes and laboratories he wanted closed down forthwith; retrenchment in the residency permits issued to rural and small-town migrants (limitchiki, persons admitted on governmental “limits”) who were overloading the Moscow housing supply. Yeltsin pestered the Politburo and the Soviet cabinet for tons of meat, fish, and produce; on city hall, he foisted heavier burdens and tauter plans.⁵² There was some clucking at the highest level at his demands but nothing to indicate a deep split.⁵³ When Saikin shared with the gorkom bureau a plan to expand the subway and, under a Politburo directive, provide every Moscow family with an apartment by the year 2000, Yeltsin whipped out his pen, drew a line through Saikin’s numbers, and superimposed more demanding ones: apartments for all by 1995 and a third more metro track than projected. Saikin could not believe his eyes.⁵⁴ Objectives such as these would have been hard to attain under the best of circumstances. Most of them were to remain on paper as the Soviet and then Russian economy went into free fall, and not to be feasible until after Yeltsin’s retirement in 1999.

Yeltsinesque populism, a nascent motif in Sverdlovsk, found its way onto the front burner in Moscow. While he continued with impromptu gifts of wristwatches—bodyguard Korzhakov had to keep a spare in his overcoat pocket—the focus shifted to rides on public transit and visitations to trouble spots. The rides were well-rehearsed trips of two or three stops on a subway car, bus, or tramcar. On a fixed destination such as a retail store, workers’ or students’ dining hall, or apartment house basement, Yeltsin would swoop down in his limousine; he bantered with the crowd; if corruption or skullduggery was uncovered, the wrongdoers were chewed out and in the direst cases fired. Managers of food stores on main boulevards learned to keep an attractive assortment of produce in their glass cases. Tipped off to that, Yeltsin had his guards look for places to be audited off the beaten track, which required the KGB to allot extra conveyances to steer the first secretary through the traffic.⁵⁵ As the columnist Vitalii Tret’yakov was to write as an early champion of Yeltsin in 1989, these field trips were in the manner of Haroun al-Rashid, the caliph from Arabian Nights who roamed Baghdad in the dress of a commoner, spreading assurance that he knew what to do about the people’s problems.⁵⁶

In the Moscow media, Mikhail Poltoranin, the new Moskovskaya pravda editor-in-chief who was moved at Yeltsin’s behest from Pravda, printed titillating, dirt-digging exposés of the illicit benefits of the nomenklatura—of the spouses of party secretaries being chauffeured to stores, of nepotism in august universities and institutes, and of fat-cat buffets, order desks, dachas, and clinics. In his question-and-answer meeting with the agitprop staff in April 1986, Yeltsin related how he had removed a raion second secretary, I. V. Danilov, for illegally converting his apartment into “a palace” with a fireplace that blew smoke into his neighbors’ flats. Officers of the city party committee had out of their own free will waived their limos and chauffeurs. “See,” Yeltsin deadpanned, “the [six] gorkom secretaries are smiling. Today they came here together in one car.”⁵⁷ That July Yeltsin initiated the ouster of Nikolai Lebedev, the rector of the Moscow State Institute for International Relations, the undergraduate training school for the Soviet diplomatic service. Lebedev’s offense had been to show preference in admissions to the children of nomenklatura officials.

In the age of glasnost, the homespun and pungent locutions of Yeltsin made him the darling of journalists. An interview with him guaranteed splashy copy and a cruise along the frontier of permissible speech. During his first year in the Moscow hot seat, Yeltsin the gadfly and moralist concentrated on the capital city; in year two, he generalized from its experience and went farther afield. Vladimir Mezentsev, a correspondent for Ostankino, the primary Soviet television studio, collared him at a youth league meeting at ZIL in April 1987. Yeltsin expostulated for the camera that the time had come for young workers to be “unfettered” and granted “creative freedom” to dance or listen to music as they liked. He castigated the Komsomol for being “covered in bureaucratic moss and cobwebs” and for hackneyed methods, like organizing forty-six overtime shifts before the branch’s forty-sixth conference. Mezentsev was agog: “He was saying words no one was then saying about the canonized Komsomol and by extension about the party. He was saying what they didn’t let me say at Ostankino. He was speaking for all of us who wept at the hypocrisies of the communist way of life.”⁵⁸ As sympathetic Muscovites saw it, he was taking the discussion of the nomenklatura and its incompetence out of their kitchens and onto the streets of the novostroiki, the tracts of cookie-cutter, high-rise housing where most of them lived and raised their children. Yeltsin further pushed the envelope by meeting with foreign newspapermen. In May 1987 he gave his first interview on non-Soviet television. He was filmed in action and then in a long conversation in his office with Diane Sawyer of CBS News, for the news special “The Soviet Union—Seven Days in May.” He was won over to scheduling it by seeing a photograph of the winsome Sawyer.⁵⁹

Yeltsin’s policies in 1985–87 were not always iconoclastic. He cautioned that cultural activity had to observe some limits of propriety. Despite the abuse of his family in the Stalin years, he was against “throwing stones into the garden of the past,” though he was for unfreezing debate and calmly reassessing errors and crimes.⁶⁰ He continued for some time to tout remedies within the old paradigm over ones that might disturb it. In July 1986, with him in the chair, the party caucus in the Moscow Soviet, the city’s municipal council, gave the newly chosen chief of its trade directorate, Nikolai Zav’yalov, fourteen days to make a “turnaround” in the supply of vegetables; when he did not achieve the impossible, he was sent packing.⁶¹ At a symposium on mass transit in 1987—to which, as a good showman, he rode a trolley bus—Yeltsin charted a plan to mark off the city into sectors and lay down hard passenger quotas in them all. The dean of economics at Moscow State University, Gavriil Popov, retorted that this evaded the core problem: In a planned economy, there was no housing market that would let Muscovites lessen their daily commutes by moving closer to work; the only way to fix the problem was to create a market. Yeltsin harrumphed and had Popov—who several years later would be an important supporter of his—struck from the guest list for future meetings.⁶² Asked at his consultation with the propagandists whether restraints on migration into Moscow would spawn a labor shortage, Yeltsin shot back, “We need not to bring in new people but to force Muscovites to work” through a police dragnet to roust out “spongers.” He defended the decree shuttering some research institutes as a wakeup call to laggards: “Closing down the first ten or fifteen… will have quite an effect in activating the others.”⁶³

Two years after losing the Moscow post, Yeltsin was to explain his hamhanded techniques as determined by education, situational needs, and necessity:

Some years later, Vitalii Tret’yakov, by then a critic of Yeltsin’s, was to deprecate the latter’s experience as Moscow boss as the flailing of a gung-ho but dim-witted Soviet udarnik—the “shock worker” or Stakhanovite of Stalinist mythology.⁶⁵ There was something of the norm-busting shock worker to the Yeltsin of 1985–87, but to pigeonhole him as that is to lose sight of the tactility that was opening him up to new viewpoints and to flushing out new allies of change. Even in Sverdlovsk, he had leavened command methods with understanding of the Soviet economy’s residual private sector. As inhospitable as ever to blatantly illegal activities, such as the sale of scarce goods under the counter at inflated prices, Yeltsin in Moscow referred with increased respect to what nonstate producers and distributors could bring to the table. At the 1986 meeting with propaganda workers, he sympathized with the charge that prices in the farmers’ bazaars were sky-high, yet went on to make different points:

If the only case Yeltsin made for free commerce in the Urals had been that it would keep food prices down, he now hinted that it might meet demand from comparatively well-off consumers, boost supply, and improve quality.

The same explorative mood came through on political topics. Most Soviet officials held their noses and tolerated the liberalizing measures the party espoused under the rubric of demokratizatsiya, democratization, at the Central Committee plenum of January 27–28, 1987; to Yeltsin, they were yeast for reform. In September 1987 he was at his seat in the Moscow Soviet when a young deputy named Arkadii Murashov, a physicist by profession, stood up to announce that he was planning to do something never before done in Soviet legislatures for the past sixty years: He was breaking unanimity to vote against a resolution sponsored by the executive. Yeltsin balled the chamber over by defending Murashov’s freedom to differ and calling for the draft motion to be referred back to committee.⁶⁷ Another example would be his warming to environmental and urban-conservation issues. Hearing voices from below, Yeltsin halted construction of an eyesore World War II memorial on Poklonnaya Hill, evicted about thirty unhealthful factories from Moscow, and had a batch of pre-Soviet street names restored and pre-Revolution mansions saved from the wrecking ball. Ecopolitics brought him into contact with the neformaly (informals), the extra-governmental organizations that sprouted as curbs on grassroots activity slackened. The Moscow informals advocated a variety of causes, everything from free speech to arms control and animal rights, but not every group was progressive or liberal. On May 6, 1987, Yeltsin and Mayor Saikin met with a delegation from Pamyat, an ultranationalist, anti-Semitic organization illegally created in the 1970s. Five hundred Pamyat activists had been waving placards on Manezh Square, in Moscow’s first wildcat demonstration since the 1920s. In August, representatives of fifty Soviet informals, most of them liberal in orientation, gathered in a Moscow hall under the protection of the gorkom.⁶⁸

The city of Moscow was a far tougher nut than Sverdlovsk for Yeltsin to crack as leader. Its economy was less militarized, its intellectual and expert classes were more influential, and it was home to the bloated central bureaucracy. At a time of ferment, it was being tugged to and fro. That is, it was both a hotbed of reformism and a stronghold for the old ways. Yeltsin’s problem was the latter and what, in an unpublished speech to the Central Committee, he decried as the snobbery of “pampered people who think they are bigwigs.”⁶⁹ With rare empathy, Gorbachev said afterward, in the mid-1990s, that he understood “it was not easy to work in Moscow and Yeltsin very likely felt more acutely than others the resistance of the party and economic nomenklatura to perestroika…. Yeltsin happened upon obstacles that in Sverdlovsk he did not suspect existed.”⁷⁰

To light his path through the Moscow labyrinth, the new maestro had neither the local knowledge nor the cohesive team he had in the Urals. The Sverdlovsk factotums in tow to Yeltsin were few; many of the Muscovites with whom he worked saw him as a hick. As in Sverdlovsk, he strategized Monday mornings with a kitchen cabinet, which by the end of 1986 included Valerii Saikin, Mikhail Poltoranin, his second secretary (the Sverdlovsker Yurii Belyakov) and secretary for ideological questions (Yurii Karabasov), and the head of the Moscow KGB (Nikolai Chelnokov). The official bureau of the gorkom congregated on Wednesdays. To keep it on its toes, Yeltsin again resorted to criticism and self-criticism, with the difference that he now shared his associates’ inadequacies with the press. The shared recreation that pumped up élan in Sverdlovsk would have been out of place in Moscow. Spinal and foot problems kept Yeltsin from playing volleyball after May 1986, when he scrimmaged at a Georgian vacation spot.⁷¹ His dacha was far from the cottages of gorkom staffers. There was no hunting range at which he could dish out quotas for fowl and game.

Yeltsin’s sense of responsibility to the regime and to the project of reforming communism spurred him on. And he craved personal success as ardently as he ever had, seeing no inconsistency between it and the reform cause. The Moscow assignment also elicited the testing script, as we have called it. As never before in his political work, Yeltsin after December 1985 felt the compulsion to show strength and proficiency. He recalls in Notes of a President how he “began to breathe in an utterly different way,” energized by the demands his new post made on him.⁷² In Confession on an Assigned Theme, he lays it on thick in describing the close of his workday. Arriving home, rarely before midnight, he would sit five or ten minutes in the limousine: “I was so worn out that I did not have the strength to raise my arm.”⁷³ His sleep budget, he declared to underlings, was four hours a night; he was up at the crack of dawn to exercise, read, and prepare for work. (Aleksandr Korzhakov confirms the schedule.)⁷⁴ Yeltsin, Korzhakov states, put great effort into memorizing names, facts, and figures: “Yeltsin came from the wilds and felt the need when he got the chance to underscore that there are people there who are as good as Muscovites.”⁷⁵ Symptomatic of the testing mode was the puffing up of the objects of his wrath into extra-large beings. Thus the district secretary drummed out for his apartment renovations was cast as comporting himself like “a prince”; others were preening “princelings” or “his majesty the worker of the apparatus.”⁷⁶

Yeltsin drew a connection between his efforts on behalf of reform and the determination of opponents to scotch them and even to do him in. In the Q&A at the House of Political Enlightenment in 1986, he selected for off-the-cuff reply questions that highlighted the point,⁷⁷ and hammered it home by quoting from an incendiary memorandum from another file:

What Yeltsin was presenting was the complex that Erik Erikson labels personal and occupational “overobedience.” Erikson’s thumbnail description of the overobedient Martin Luther is evocative of Yeltsin at this crossroads—“a certain zest in the production of problems, a rebellious mocking in dramatic helplessness, and a curious honesty (and honest curiosity) in the insistence on getting to the point, the fatal point, the true point.”⁷⁹ Overobedience, as the Luther of Wittenberg shows, can be the antechamber to mutiny if the excitable concentration on means coincides with the setting in of incertitude about ends. And that is how it was with Yeltsin in Moscow.