Yeltsin: A Life

CHAPTER SEVEN The Yeltsin Phenomenon

Yeltsin was moved in early December 1987 from the principal Kremlin hospital in the city to the forest calm of the Soviet government’s sanitarium in Barvikha, west of Moscow. He was there through February 1988. His mother visited from Sverdlovsk. Student friends from Urals Polytechnic sent flowers, get-well cards, and one caller a week. Yeltsin depicts the stay in Confession on an Assigned Theme as a fugue of obsessional self-analysis and indifference to normal temporal rhythms:

Confession was thrown together as a book in the fall of 1989, when Yeltsin was aiming for a political effect, and contains a certain amount of self-mythologization. There is some of that in this passage. From what I have heard from family members, however, Yeltsin’s torments were not feigned. His dissociation from reality was a kind of “moratorium,” as some psychoanalysts term it: a time away for cleansing and reorientation that in many cultures is reserved for the young.² It was necessary to Yeltsin’s recovery, personal and political.

As Boris Yeltsin exorcized his private demons, his Central Committee gambit was having far-reaching reverberations in the public square. That a ranking politico had summarily fallen from grace was standard stuff for those who knew their Soviet history. But the synergy with reforming communism gave a new twist to this Icarus crash. In the game of transitional politics, the short-term loser had seized what a game theorist would categorize as a “first-mover” advantage. Just as the Soviet Union steamed off into the uncharted waters of democratization, Yeltsin had established a strategic edge that would outbalance the penalties levied on him.³

A Russian who read between the lines in Pravda on November 13, 1987, could have extracted six claims about the political situation:

For Mikhail Gorbachev, the short-term victor, some of these claims were more easily countered than others. When students in the capital city passed around pro-Yeltsin petitions and marched in the streets, the uniformed and secret police kept watch on them. Several hundred demonstrators gathered on November 14 in downtown Sverdlovsk; on November 15 Yurii Petrov, Yeltsin’s friend and the first secretary of the obkom, received a delegation and accepted a protest letter addressed to the Politburo. Afraid of rallies “in the guise of preparations for the New Year’s holiday,” the obkom would in December cordon off 1905 Square.⁴

The censors decreed a media blackout on these events, and Kremlin agitprop was able to circulate an airbrushed account of the affair. But word of the petitions and demonstrations, and rumors of what Yeltsin had said to the Central Committee, spread like wildfire through the Moscow political underground and the foreign media. One of the more cockeyed simulations of the speech was prepared by Mikhail Poltoranin of Moskovskaya pravda. He was about to be dismissed as editor, but before he was, the Secretariat directed him to speak to 700 personnel from the Soviet local press gathered in a Central Committee academy in Moscow. The newspapermen wanted to know what Yeltsin had actually said to the October plenum, which Poltoranin was not of the rank to have attended. In his apartment that night, he pecked out on his typewriter an apocryphal speech—the one he would have wanted Yeltsin to make. Knowing how unloved Raisa Gorbacheva was, he put into Yeltsin’s mouth words about how she had telephoned him with peremptory instructions on party business. Poltoranin ran off several hundred copies and distributed them the next day without anyone stopping him.⁵

Gorbachev would have done well to release the transcript of the plenum. His more enlightened advisers held that declassification would confute the untruths being told about it and that news about Yeltsin’s disjointed performance would be unflattering to him. To stonewall, they said, would put the nimbus of “a martyr for justice” around his head.⁶ The original secret speech by Khrushchev, circulated in redacted form to party members in 1956, was not published in full in the USSR until 1989. Gorbachev moved more quickly than that, but not quickly enough. It took until March of 1989 for the plenum transcript to appear on the page.

Draconian measures against Yeltsin were not feasible at a time when Gorbachev was liberalizing the Soviet system. Criminal proceedings were out of the question. Yeltsin had parliamentary immunity as a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet. This never stopped Stalin’s OGPU or NKVD, but for a deputy to be arrested in 1987, the Soviet would have had to vote to lift the exemption and spark a national and international furor.⁷ And glasnost would have been no panacea. The unvarnished truth would only verify that in-house foes of reform existed, that Gorbachev was hugging the political center, and that Yeltsin had a more forward posture and was waylaid for it. And full disclosure of the context would have shown that Yeltsin’s diagnosis of perestroika was onto something—that the Soviet economy and society were deteriorating. Petroleum production of the USSR had gone into decline in 1985, petrodollars from exports were sharply down (mostly due to a dropoff in world oil prices), and the finances of the government were under strain more than since the 1940s.⁸ In the teeth of this, the firing of Yeltsin and even his penance, which most would have assumed was offered under duress, made him a magnet for popular discontent. “In the Russian tradition,” as one former Soviet publicist was to write of him, “the aggrieved mutineer earns the sympathy and benevolence of the common people.”⁹

The great Cossack mutineers of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, Stenka Razin and Yemel’yan Pugachëv, paid for their impudence with their heads.¹⁰ This twentieth-century mutineer kept his. The executioner’s axe and the Gulag being unavailable, what was Gorbachev going to do with him?

If history were the touchstone, Gorbachev had little to worry about. As far back as the 1920s, the also-rans in personality and factional quarrels within the party had never recouped their losses. The renunciation of violence after Stalin left general secretaries with ample means for sidelining an opponent. Gorbachev made it plain to Yeltsin that he was ostracized from upper-level political activity. How the ban was expressed depends on whose memoir one reads. Yeltsin says it was permanent and general: “I will no longer let you take part in politics [politika].” Gorbachev writes in his Life and Reforms of saying to Yeltsin that he “could not return to the sphere of big-time politics [sfera bol’shoi politiki] any time soon,” which connotes a door ajar.¹¹ Gorbachev might have wielded a much heavier truncheon than this. He could have pensioned Yeltsin off, a possibility that surfaced in irritable conversations between them in November 1987. Gorbachev did not want this solution. He wisecracked to Yeltsin that he was against retirement since, they being the same age, it might be thought appropriate for him as well.¹² Yeltsin was still a member of the CPSU Central Committee. Under the rulebook, only a congress of the party could expel him against his will, but Gorbachev was capable of forcing him to resign. In fact he did that to ninety-eight longin-the-tooth members of the committee in April 1989, but not to Yeltsin. Another device forsworn was to make Yeltsin ambassador to a distant capital—as Nikita Khrushchev did in 1957 when he made Vyacheslav Molotov, who had been prime minister under Stalin, Soviet envoy to Outer Mongolia.¹³ Yeltsin believed Gorbachev preferred to keep him in Moscow and in his sights: “He thought I was less of a risk nearby. It is always best to keep a freethinker close at hand, so you can keep him under observation. And what would an ambassador be up to? Who knew?”¹⁴

So why the lenience? In his memoirs, Gorbachev credits it to his chivalry (“It is not in me to make short work of people”) and collectivism (“the strong belief that with us everything had to be done on the basis of comradeship”).¹⁵ But it was not all about the kindliness of the general secretary. Yeltsin points to a more political theory, that Gorbachev wanted him to survive as a balance against conservatives and fence-sitters: “It seems to me that if Gorbachev had not had a Yeltsin he would have had to invent one.”¹⁶ Gorbachev’s desire to use Yeltsin as a counterweight dovetailed with his reading of the past record, which was that no one in Yeltsin’s unenviable predicament could pose a threat. To these, there needs to be added an attitudinal factor: cocksureness. Georgii Shakhnazarov, Gorbachev’s main political aide, several times implored him to expatriate Yeltsin, to an ambassadorship, and absent him from the upcoming USSR elections. Gorbachev would not countenance it. “He regarded Yeltsin as semiliterate, as understanding nothing, as a drunkard.” He sorely misjudged Yeltsin and, says the cerebral Shakhnazarov, refused to see that Yeltsin’s personality, the festering grudge Yeltsin bore, and the pentup appetite for change might commix into “an explosive force.”¹⁷

Had the Soviet rules of the game still applied, Yeltsin’s political career would have been well and truly over. But the game was in kaleidoscopic motion, and soon was to provide undreamt-of opportunities outside the iron cage of the bureaucracy. His intuition in 1987 about which way the wind was blowing, the action of speaking out before the Central Committee, and Gorbachev’s overkill reaction to it constituted an inflection point in the breakup of the communist system. The juncture set up a robust alignment of political forces on the macro issue of how fast the system should change: Yeltsin in the van as the apotheosis of change, party conservatives in the rear, Gorbachev in the spongy middle. Successive crises and feedback loops were to fortify it even as the political spectrum was displaced in a more revolutionary direction. Originally limited to the elite, the fatal alignment would reproduce itself in the population when electoral freedom made it relevant to them, which in turn widened the fissures at the elite plateau. As one of the directors of Yeltsin’s eventual campaign for president of Russia was to remark in 1991, “This campaign began in 1987.”¹⁸

On November 19, 1987, a bulletin from the TASS news agency said Yeltsin had been appointed first deputy chairman of Gosstroi, the State Construction Committee of the Soviet Union. His blackest fears had gone unrealized. He was not to be banished to Ulan Bator or Addis Ababa, or to a muddy Soviet construction site, or to a cottage in Moscow oblast. The new position was a sinecure, on a rank with minister in the USSR government, and was at the summit of an industry Yeltsin had known since his twenties.

Licking his wounds, Yeltsin started work at Gosstroi on February 8, 1988. Once ejected from the Politburo, he kept the VIP flat on Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya but lost his bodyguards and was downgraded to a mid-sized Chaika limousine and a cramped dacha. Gosstroi was in a modern building on Pushkin Street, later to house the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament. Not what he was used to in space or conveniences, the office there was all he had.

The pressure on Yeltsin did not abate. The chief of Gosstroi, Yurii Batalin, a pipeline specialist and a Sverdlovsker with a UPI diploma, was under orders to report any wayward activity. The KGB eavesdropped on Yeltsin’s phone calls; plainclothes officers lurked in the foyer to see who was visiting.¹⁹ As he settled in, Yeltsin took lynx-eyed note of the surveillance: He would turn on the radio or pour water in the washbasin to muffle sensitive conversations. His first ever desk job bored him no end. He gave one visitor the impression that he was permanently stifling a scream.²⁰ He was to write a memorandum to Prime Minister Ryzhkov proposing that Gosstroi be done away with as a fifth wheel and its significant functions transferred to other agencies.²¹ “My work with real, live people has been replaced by the office,” was his plaint later that year. “I shuffle papers.”²²

Yeltsin was at sea psychologically for months. He took it hard when the February plenum of the Central Committee confirmed his demotion from the Politburo. His Gosstroi assistant, Lev Sukhanov, was stunned at his condition the next day: “When he got to work that morning, his face was vacant. It looked to me like the finale of a burial service staged by his Politburo colleagues. He suffered from all of this, but somehow found strength within himself and worked the entire day.”²³ Yeltsin’s memoirs painted his Gosstroi entr’acte as “a nightmarish year-and-a-half” and “perhaps the most difficult days of my life.” All was “dead silence and emptiness” in the office. It was “torture” to watch his cream-colored Kremlin telephone in the hope of an expiatory call from Gorbachev. He felt like tearing it out of the wall, lest the appliance “spout new miseries” for him.²⁴ Dejected at work, and with time on his hands, Yeltsin took up the game of tennis in 1988 and bought with cash savings his first automobile, a tiny, silver-colored Moskvich. Aleksandr Korzhakov, a KGB bodyguard to Yeltsin when he was Moscow party boss, helped teach him how to drive the vehicle. Yeltsin was a poor pupil who often mistook brake for gas pedal. “It was after this that my hair began to go gray,” Korzhakov says.²⁵

Politically, until the elections for the Soviet parliament in the spring of 1989, Yeltsin was in a netherworld. He was banned from the Moscow media, and the only interviews he granted were to reporters from abroad and from the Baltic republics of the USSR. The chairman of the Party Control Commission, Mikhail Solomentsev, hauled him on the carpet in the spring of 1988 for contact with the foreign press. “He rudely cut me off,” says Solomentsev, “and asserted that he had no need to ask anyone’s permission, that he was a free man and had the right to give his opinion wherever he liked and to whomever he liked.”²⁶ The interviews did subside for a spell. In May Yeltsin spoke with two Russian publications; the party Secretariat blocked publication. He then resumed interviews with the foreign media, going on the BBC in May and on the three American television networks in June.

The Nineteenth CPSU Conference in June–July 1988 was convened to showcase Gorbachevian political reform. Yeltsin, who could have sat in by right as a Central Committee member, held out for nomination by a territorial subunit of the party. Stymied in Moscow and in Sverdlovsk (where Gorbachev and Ligachëv had just made Leonid Bobykin, a competitor of Yeltsin’s, the first secretary), he snagged a ticket from Kareliya, a minority republic of the RSFSR located on the Finnish border. As in October, he had to exert himself at the conference to speak. Two notes to Gorbachev, in the chair, did not do the trick. On the fifth and last morning of the conference, July 1, Yeltsin announced to the Karelian delegation, seated to the back of the mezzanine, that he was taking the floor by storm, “like the Winter Palace” falling to the Bolsheviks and the workers in 1917. He trooped to the foot of the dais and stood there, staring at the presidium and brandishing his red card. Looking daggers, Gorbachev had a staffer tell him he would be recognized if he sat down and waited his turn. Yeltsin did so and was given the floor.²⁷

The gatecrashing paid off. To the 5,000 conferees, Yeltsin gave a feisty fifteen-minute speech that he had massaged for weeks. Excerpts were broadcast on Soviet television, and it was published in the press. It contained no jabs at Gorbachev and few words about Yegor Ligachëv, with whom he said he had tactical differences only. But his wad of accusations got larger, as he added the need for transparency in the party’s finances and for a downsizing of the apparatus. Yeltsin was more recalcitrant than in 1987 on the issues of mass benefit from reform and the privileges of the well-fed Soviet elite. Perestroika had been configured “under the hypnosis of words” and had “not resolved any of the tangible, real problems of people”; to go on this way was to “risk losing grip on the steering wheel and on political stability.” On elitist patterns, where he had previously limited himself to those counter to party norms, he now hacked away at the norms per se. Communists’ monthly dues, he observed, paid for food packets for “the starving nomenklatura” and for “luxurious residences, dachas, and sanatoriums of such an amplitude that you are ashamed when the representatives of foreign parties visit.” All political initiatives, said Yeltsin, ought to be discussed without preconceptions and put to national referendums. The CPSU general secretary, the Politburo, and party officers down the line should be elected by the rank-and-file, restricted to two terms in office, and retired at sixty-five.²⁸

About October 1987, Yeltsin was obdurate. He demanded restitution, contrasting that to the posthumous amends being made to people purged by Stalin decades before:

In one swoop, Yeltsin had publicly affiliated himself with diversification of the political system and justice for the ghosts of the Soviet past—and had tarred Gorbachev and those who laid him low in 1987 with intolerance and rigidity. As Vitalii Tret’yakov was to put it, “These two words, ‘political rehabilitation,’ intuitively found by Yeltsin, were a godsend—a wondrous public-relations move, we would say today, one that a thousand first-class political technologists and image makers would never have come up with.”²⁹

After Yeltsin left the stage, every second speaker roasted him. Most had been put up to it by Lev Zaikov and the Moscow party staff, who assumed that Yeltsin would find a way to get to the microphone. Ligachëv, whom some of Gorbachev’s men tried to dissuade from speaking, was the most vituperative, maximizing their differences and saying he and Yeltsin diverged not only in tactics but in strategy. “Boris, you [ty] are wrong,” he said in a concluding sentence that would be flung back in his face over the next two years. A Sverdlovsk delegate, Vladimir Volkov, the party secretary of the Kalinin missile plant, extolled Yeltsin and won applause for it. Gorbachev had wanted to concentrate on his leaderly agenda, but expended almost half of his conference encore on Yeltsin. “Here he has some kind of a complex,” Anatolii Chernyayev entered in his diary.³⁰

For the Yeltsin story, the striking thing about the conference was the entrenchment of the political cleavage opened up by his secret speech in October 1987. The party did not rehabilitate its freelancer. Beyond the crenellated Kremlin walls, Lev Sukhanov said, he had achieved “the popular acclaim any politician can only dream about.”³¹

Yeltsin did not see it this way at first. He once again felt sorry for himself over the invective by Ligachëv and the conservatives: “A feeling of apathy washed over me. I did not want struggle, not explanations, not anything. All I wanted was to forget it all and be left in peace.” The heartsickness lasted only a few weeks. He was cheered up by the thousands of letters and telegrams that arrived from all over the Soviet Union. The subject matter of most of them was not any particular political line but, says Yeltsin, compassion for him as having been mistreated. Through these communications from afar, people “stretched out their hands to me, and I was able to lean on them and get back on my feet.”³² Yeltsin’s dislike of elite privilege did not keep him from leaving for vacation at a government rest house in Jurmala, Latvia. When he returned, citizens began showing up in droves to see him. Batalin had a reception area installed near the Gosstroi checkpoint where those not admitted to his office could write out questions for him.³³

The new Yeltsin was sought after by other agents of change. In August 1988, for example, he agreed to join the supervisory board of the Memorial Society, the new nongovernmental organization for promoting construction of a monument in Moscow to the millions imprisoned and murdered under Stalin. He was chosen for this honor on write-in ballots by readers of the newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta and the magazine Ogonëk. These publications were favorites of the Russian intelligentsia, with whom Yeltsin had few connections.³⁴ Yeltsin was also seeing how reporters and editors could be allies. Jonathan Sanders, a Moscow producer for CBS News, arranged several Yeltsin interviews and decided to buy him a red-striped Brooks Brothers necktie while on home leave in New York. He spotted Yeltsin walking down the Gosstroi steps, explained that he had to be punctilious about giving a politician a present, but handed him the tie anyway. Yeltsin put it on admiringly and wrapped his own tie around Sanders’s neck, turning the scene into an exchange of tokens of respect.³⁵ An invitation by students to answer questions at the Higher Komsomol School on November 12, 1988, gave him further scope. Shortly after the session, Sukhanov found a counterfeit transcript of Yeltsin’s remarks for sale on Arbat Street. “I showed him this ‘commercial copy’ and he asked, ‘Why have we not made our own transcript ?’ A very good question. So he put his daughters Tanya and Lena to work and they typed up a tape of the session that Sasha Korzhakov had made.” Twelve carbon copies were distributed through informal networks. Cooperative journalists used every trick in the book to get the text published. In the Perm youth paper, they got the editor to agree by giving it the title “Politician or Roughneck?”³⁶

Yeltsin was increasingly willing to moor his critique in unblinking views of the Soviet past. Russians, he said to the Komsomol students, were submissive because they learned to be that way from “parasitic” party and state structures that monopolized power, hid behind a veil of secrecy, and taught individuals to make “a ritual of the bearing of sacrifices” at every turn. It all went back to a history in which one cannot help see the experience of the Urals and of the Yeltsin family: “First the people were forced to put on the altar an inhuman agricultural policy [collectivization], then they were required to give up such timeless values as spirituality and culture, and finally they were divested of the ability to define their goals self-reliantly [samostoyatel’no] and to go about attaining them self-reliantly.”³⁷

When the talk turned to remedies, Yeltsin was not a flaming militant. Besides his now faddish populism, the pillars of his approach were outspokenness, the need for reform to show results, and support for political competition and inclusiveness. His forté was not the clairvoyant pronouncement but the folksy verbalization of what many others were already thinking and had been subdued from saying in public. Yeltsin, as a Moscow academic was to say after one of his more plain-spoken statements, was giving voice to “what the people have freely talked about for ages” in their kitchens or at their dachas.³⁸ To put it in the more formal language of anthropology, he was a leader in the “discursive deconstruction” of the late Soviet system, taking apart meanings that were increasingly disconnected from reality.³⁹ On the economic and social front, he was for a cooling of the polemics and for brass-tacks improvements in living standards. Although he mentioned a few action steps, such as a hike in the output of consumer goods and building supplies to be funded by cuts to the construction and space budgets, he laid out no general conception of reform. At the Komsomol academy, he held his thoughts on it for his edification alone: “I have stuffed them far down in the archives, in a safe, so that no one sees them.”⁴⁰ It was a subterfuge his enraptured listeners let him get away with. In a New Year’s interview with newspaperman Pavel Voshchanov, who would be his press secretary in 1991–92, Yeltsin said he wanted to annul the “double privileges” built into the Soviet system, so that a ruble earned by a government minister would buy the same goods and services as a ruble earned by the janitor in the ministry’s headquarters.⁴¹ But this was more a design for redressing past abuses than for building a productive and equitable economy.

In the political realm, Yeltsin was for the liberalization of electoral laws enacted after the Nineteenth Conference and fought measures, such as Gorbachev’s provision to have party secretaries chair local councils, that might adulterate the reform. What about the Communist Party and its “leading role”? At the conference in July, Yeltsin favored “socialist pluralism,” Gorbachev’s shorthand for heterogeneity within the ruling party, and came out against a system containing two socialist parties. By late 1988, he was telling his wife over the dinner table that multiparty democracy, without limitations, was inescapable. Naina was quizzical: “I told him, ‘Borya, what are you talking about? It is too early. Why say such a thing?’ And he said, ‘Well, you see, all this will come about, it will all come to this.’”⁴² But at the Komsomol school Yeltsin dodged questions about the supremacy of the CPSU and made seven well-behaved references to Lenin. He was asked, since “your popularity with the people is not less” than Gorbachev’s, “could you be head of the party and state?” Once there was full-fledged competition, Yeltsin answered demurely, “I may participate a little, as they say.”⁴³ He was still denying advocacy of multipartism in mid-March 1989, right before the Soviet parliamentary elections, while calling for a discussion of its advisability.

Coyness about an overt challenge to Gorbachev fooled no one. Yeltsin had by this time traversed the threshold dividing dissidence, or criticism of those in power, from opposition, or activity aimed at gaining power.⁴⁴ And the general secretary could hear his footfall. “Indubitably,” recalled Georgii Shakhnazarov, “Gorbachev saw in Yeltsin his principal rival for the future. Possessing a low opinion of [Yeltsin’s] intellect and his other qualities, he feared not the person-to-person competition but the very fact of the appearance of a leader of the opposition.”⁴⁵ Shakhnazarov did not share Gorbachev’s complacency about Yeltsin and repeated the advice to send him to a cushy, faraway embassy and so keep him out of the 1989 national elections. Gorbachev turned a deaf ear.

One of the reasons Yeltsin accepted speaking engagements, and stood on the stage for hours, was to prove that he was out of his sickbed. Of the encounter at the Komsomol school, Sukhanov writes: “In speaking without a gap, he was able to exhibit that he was in good shape physically. He was rumored to be seriously ill, and he did not want to look impotent and pitiable.”⁴⁶ The students asked how he had handled the slings and arrows of the past year. He answered in high testing mode and educed Russia’s revolutionary past:

Under terms of the political reforms agreed to in 1987–88, Soviet parliamentary bodies were to be reshaped. A new USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, with 2,250 members, was to be instituted. Two-thirds of its members were to be elected in territorial districts. One-third were to be chosen by the cartel of officially recognized and controlled associations. The CPSU filled its quota of 100 seats in a retrograde procedure: The Politburo nominated Gorbachev and ninety-nine others in a plenum of the party Central Committee on January 10, 1989, and a second plenum on March 16 approved all 100. As was barely noticed at the time, Boris Yeltsin in the January plenum cast the very first dissenting vote in the Central Committee, on any issue, since the 1920s by abstaining on support for the nomination of Yegor Ligachëv. In the vote on the nominations in March, he was one of seventy-eight committee members to vote against Ligachëv, and may have voted against other nominees of the in-group.⁴⁸

As the party’s bogeyman, Yeltsin had no chance at a protected spot. He could get into the congress only by standing in one of the 1,500 geographic districts. Gorbachev chewed over entering a district race but did not, out of fear that Yeltsin would run against him and beat him.⁴⁹ Gorbachev’s selfdoubt did not make the electoral Rubicon one that Yeltsin could cross lightly. Government ministers, unlike party workers, were barred from the congress. To take up a seat if elected, Yeltsin would have to leave the Gosstroi position. The congress would name a new, compact standing parliament from among its members—the old name, Supreme Soviet, stayed—and only those on the Soviet would draw salaries as legislators. If Yeltsin got into the 2,250-member congress and was not one of the 542 chosen for the Supreme Soviet, he would be without a livelihood. It did not stop him. Sentient that the decision had “ripened long ago,” in mid-December 1988 he threw his hat in the ring.⁵⁰

Scouting out nomination possibilities took Yeltsin two months. Papers were filed on his behalf in fifty localities, and on February 11 he was nominated as a native son in Berezniki, traveling there by a circuitous air route through Leningrad to throw CPSU monitors off. He related his embarrassment of riches to Anatolii Luk’yanov, the Central Committee secretary with whom he had shared a dacha in 1985. Yeltsin was duty-bound, Luk’yanov said, to leave the decision to the Politburo—to which Yeltsin snorted that this was “a conversation right out of the 1930s” that he would sooner forget.⁵¹ His competitive juices raised, he took his chances by gunning for a seat in Moscow and not in the Urals. During the prescribed winnowingdown period, as the party organs tried to keep him off the ballot or shunt him to the boondocks, he pounded home his core message. “In Boris Yeltsin there is certainly more than an ounce of Huey Long,” David Remnick of The Washington Post noted; he half-expected Yeltsin to break out in song on the Louisianan’s motto, “Every Man a King.” Remnick also saw a parallel with another American icon. “When [Yeltsin] stands in front of a television camera, he will sometimes stop in midsentence, comb his thick mane of white hair, smile ironically into the lens, and then continue. Muhammad Ali used to pull the same cocky move after an easy fight.”⁵² On February 22, 1989, following a twelve-hour nomination meeting, the local electoral commission registered Yeltsin in National-Territorial District No. 1, Moscow’s at-large district—the most populous and the most visible in the country. He took his name off the Berezniki ballot.

A ragged troupe headed by Aleksandr Muzykantskii, a Gosstroi engineer and friend of Lev Sukhanov, ran the campaign. Several were to stick with Yeltsin afterward. Valerii Bortsov, a junior apparatchik in the south Russian city of Rostov, took the train to Moscow in January to offer his services. He got a meeting with Yeltsin, who decided to make him an unpaid assistant. At a rally in February, Yeltsin teasingly asked Valentina Lantseva, a Pravda correspondent from Kazakhstan who was carrying a basket of flowers she had bought for her husband’s birthday, if they were for him. They struck up a conversation and exchanged telephone numbers. Three days later, she agreed to be his press spokesperson, also without pay.⁵³

Yeltsin’s campaign brochure, “Perestroika Will Bring Changes,” came out on March 21, only five days before the vote. Yeltsin posters were pasted in apartment stairwells, on lampposts, and at public-transit stops. A committee of activists in nineteen factories and institutes spread the word at the workplace level.⁵⁴ Digging for the public-speaking skills honed in Sverdlovsk and the Moscow gorkom, Yeltsin darted across the city, giving several talks daily and answering reams of questions, town meeting–style. The crowds in parks, hockey arenas, and stadiums reached into the tens of thousands by the last week. Many fans wore sandwich-boards, had “Fight, Boris!” (Boris’, Boris!) buttons on their lapels, or carried hand-lettered signs blaring “Hands Off of Yeltsin,” “Boris Is Right,” “We Are with You, Comrade Yeltsin,” “Not the People for Socialism but Socialism for the People.” Yeltsin lapped up the attention. His war cry was the “struggle for justice” and against moribund practices and privilege. Bill Keller of the New York Times caught the flavor of an open-air rally in front of 7,000 shivering urbanites:

All appearances concluded with Yeltsin clapping his hands, then clasping them in front of his forehead and wagging them in the direction of the audience.

Yeltsin’s one opponent was the old-line director of the ZIL auto plant, Yevgenii Brakov; more than twenty potential candidates, including Politburo member Vitalii Vorotnikov, withdrew. Brakov made an ideal personal foil, but Yeltsin sanctimoniously refused to stoop to unsportsmanlike “American” methods. Planted questions—asking him to explain, for instance, the Ipat’ev House demolition in Sverdlovsk or how his daughter Yelena had been issued a nomenklatura apartment in 1987—caused him heartburn but were lost in the shuffle.⁵⁶ And the party’s dirty tricks—defacing Yeltsin signs, cooking up pro-Brakov letters to Moskovskaya pravda, sending claques to Brakov rallies—backfired and played into his David-versus-Goliath image. In early March, the long-delayed publication in a CPSU journal of the record of the October 1987 plenum was manna from heaven. Vitalii Tret’yakov, who would eventually repent of his support, gushed that the transcript showed Yeltsin to be prescient (“he alone said yesterday what everyone is discussing now”), an information democrat (“the destroyer of secrets always ingratiates people”), and civic-minded (he “is not fighting for power for his own sake”).⁵⁷ Ten days before the election, the Central Committee took the misguided decision to impanel a commission, chaired by Politburo member Vadim Medvedev, to see if Yeltsin had deviated from the Communist Party line. The three largest rallies of the race—and the largest public gatherings in Moscow since the 1917 revolution—were called to protest the commission, which was to be quietly dropped in May. Yeltsin gauged it and the ersatz letters to the editor (Lantseva showed many were counterfeit) to have fattened his vote total by 15 to 20 percentage points.

Other candidates hopped on the bandwagon. The thirty-five-year-old Sergei Stankevich, a historian specializing in the U.S. Congress who was in a neck-and-neck race in the Cherëmushkii area of Moscow, sent Yeltsin a telegram of endorsement and then photocopied it and used it as an advertisement for himself. Twenty-six other liberal candidates, mostly professors, scientists, and literati, did the same. Some distributed pictures of themselves shaking hands with Yeltsin. Stankevich, who had organized a pro-Yeltsin demonstration at a Moscow subway stop in November 1987, could not because he had never met him.⁵⁸ Across the city, “The main orienting points… were opposition to all the bosses and support for everyone who was for Yeltsin. All candidates with a lower rank than their main opponents did everything they could to emphasize their ordinariness, almost as if it were a nobleman’s title, and all who had the slightest basis for doing so played up their nearness to Yeltsin.”⁵⁹

Yeltsin glided home in District No. 1 with 89 percent of the popular vote on March 26—5,117,745 out of 5,736,470 votes cast, with little variation across districts. Since Moscow had 1.1 million CPSU members and Brakov’s take was less than 400,000, Yeltsin netted the ballots of most of Moscow’s communists, to say nothing of noncommunists. Even in neighborhoods peopled by high-ranking party workers and bureaucrats, Brakov did not rise above 30 percent.⁶⁰ Intimates of Gorbachev told the American ambassador, Jack Matlock, they had been sure Yeltsin would win but were “astonished by how much.”⁶¹ Yeltsin’s personal absolution and his drubbing of the nomenklatura candidate stole headlines from the change in institutions and political process represented by the holding of a semifree election. Candidates who had put their names on the Stankevich telegram polled 20 percentage points more on average than candidates who did not. First Secretary Lev Zaikov, like Gorbachev, took election as part of the Central Committee hundred rather than try his chances in a Moscow district. Second Secretary Yurii Prokof’ev ran in a district and was trounced, with 13 percent of the votes; Valerii Saikin, the mayor, got 42 percent in his district and pulled out of the runoff that was required when no one had secured a majority in the first lap.

In a lucid election postmortem, Tret’yakov reported how Yeltsin’s win made explicit every one of the implicit lessons of October–November 1987. People were connecting the dots:

Even his detractors, Tret’yakov continued, “never tire of reiterating his positive features,” and Yeltsin came across as “contradictory but likeable in a human way even in his gaffes and inconsistencies.” Most important were the mass perceptions of the gravitas that accrued to Yeltsin from his background in the governing elite:

Three days after gaining his seat, Yeltsin set out for a month-long vacation in Kislovodsk, in the North Caucasus. The decision removed him from the runoff stage, where some pro-reform nominees needed help. It struck some as eccentric. Aleksandr Muzykantskii also detected that Yeltsin wanted other players to make do without him for a time, and so to feel the need to approach him with offers of cooperation on his, the winner’s, terms.⁶³ Back from Kislovodsk, Yeltsin orated at rallies in the Moscow suburb of Zelenograd and in front of the Luzhniki stadium.

From the first day of operations of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, May 25, 1989, it was to be a little more than two years until the life-and-death crisis of the Soviet regime. Most of this caesura Yeltsin spent either in unproductive legislative activity or in campaigning for office. Time and initiative were on his side because he had the ace in the hole—people power—that other contestants did not have.

The congress’s organizing parley, televised live, showed the difficulty of translating charisma into institutional influence. High on the docket was selection of a chairman of the Supreme Soviet. It would be the cardinal office in the Soviet state, and Gorbachev meant to have it. In a conversation with Yeltsin in mid-May about their plans, Gorbachev offered him a ministerial post; Yeltsin refused and said, “Everything will be decided by the congress.” At a Politburo meeting days after that, Gorbachev instructed aides to offer Yeltsin the position of first deputy premier of the RSFSR and to craft an “intermediate response” to questions about Yeltsin’s dependability.⁶⁴ The offer seems not to have been made. Yeltsin abstained on the motion at the May Central Committee plenum to nominate Gorbachev for the chairmanship—the only member to do so—and then declared he would vote for it in the congress because he was bound by party discipline. The Soviet Union, he said, was in a “revolutionary situation” which the party did not seem capable of facing.⁶⁵ At the congress, he behaved coquettishly. He said in his maiden speech on May 26 that he was jobless as of the day before and might possibly agree to “some kind of nomination.” That night a Yeltsin representative consented to the urging of deputies from Sverdlovsk that his name be offered from the floor. Aleksandr Obolenskii, a little-known engineer from Leningrad, said he would do it—only to flipflop and nominate himself. Yeltsin distanced himself from the attempt, and 96 percent of the deputies voted on May 27 to elect Gorbachev.⁶⁶

After this comedy of errors came a more pressing problem: Yeltsin having given up his Gosstroi post, unfriendly deputies blocked him from so much as a seat in the Supreme Soviet. Of the twelve deputies nominated for the RSFSR’s eleven seats in the Council of Nationalities (the section of the Supreme Soviet for which Yeltsin was eligible), he finished dead last in the congressional voting, his 5 million popular votes notwithstanding. The day was saved by Gavriil Popov, the Moscow economic thinker whom Yeltsin had cold-shouldered in 1987. He sold Gorbachev on a resolution. Aleksei Kazannik, a jurist from Omsk, Siberia, freed up a seat for him, and the congress on May 29 approved. Gorbachev wanted a vote on whether Yeltsin would fill the vacancy. Kazannik would not budge on the package deal and received more than 100,000 congratulatory telegrams.⁶⁷ In his first speech to the congress on May 31, Yeltsin called for a yearly country-wide referendum on confidence in the chairman of parliament and for conversion of the Kremlin medical directorate into a service for mothers and children.

When the Supreme Soviet met in June, Yeltsin, with Gorbachev again in acquiescence, was made chairman of its committee on construction and architecture.⁶⁸ It was a dead end, Gorbachev seemed to think, and it tied Yeltsin to housekeeping matters more than to politics. Yeltsin did not disagree and invested little in the position. Its real utility was visibility and the midtown workspace and telephones put at the disposal of Lev Sukhanov, now his paid parliamentary assistant, and volunteers. Yeltsin said in October 1989 he was thinking of giving up the committee because it had no staff and pulled him into citizen petitions and bureaucratic red tape.⁶⁹ As lawmaker, he was listless. He introduced no bills and did not affect policy. He built his everyman image by signing himself out of the Kremlin health clinic and into City Polyclinic No. 5. Naina Yeltsina did her part by shopping in neighborhood grocery stores not reserved for the elite. Vladimir Mezentsev, a press aide to Yeltsin in 1989–90 and a critic ever since, had the sense that she did all her shopping in such places. “I was a bachelor at the time, and Naina Iosifovna constantly gave me advice on the shops where sausages would be available.”⁷⁰ During his campaign for Russian president in 1991, Yeltsin was able to advertise that she “spends three to four hours a day chasing around shops, like all the other unfortunate Moscow women.”⁷¹

What should not be missed in all this is that Yeltsin’s year in the last Soviet parliament extended his horizons in more ways than one. The catalyst was the Interregional Deputies Group (MDG), the pioneering democratic caucus, with about 250 members, formed against Gorbachev’s wishes on July 29–30, 1989. The conscience of the group was Andrei Sakharov, the erudite atomic physicist, advocate of human rights, and Nobel laureate who had been freed from house arrest in 1986; its arranger was Gavriil Popov.

During the spring campaign, Sakharov acceded to Yeltsin’s request to stay out of District No. 1, but considered him to be “of a completely different [lesser] caliber than Gorbachev,” and bumptious at that.⁷² His attitude eased after the election, as he came to know Yeltsin and to see how much he had changed. “I don’t understand how Yeltsin arrives at his decisions,” Sakharov said to an American friend in the autumn, “but he usually arrives at the right answer.”⁷³

As formation of the Interregional group was being discussed, some of the founders wanted Yeltsin excluded as an ex-partocrat and a rabble rouser. Yeltsin wanted not just to join but to be sole leader. That was fine with Popov. At the organizing meeting, in the Moscow Cinema House, he and a petroleum engineer from Orenburg named Vladislav Shapovalenko put forward Yeltsin as chairman. Sergei Stankevich said he could support Yeltsin if his position were open to review after one year. Yurii Boldyrev, an engineer elected in a district in Leningrad, led a countercharge: “If you want to create a centralized party, go right ahead and create one. I will not participate. We will not fall in behind a leader.” Viktor Pal’m, an Estonian natural scientist, said choosing Yeltsin or anyone else as boss would be “a fatal mistake.” Effective leaders “are not appointed or elected” but “come into being” in the course of solving collective problems. Pal’m proposed the designation of equal co-chairmen. Popov agreed, and five were elected: Yeltsin (first, with 144 votes), historian Yurii Afanas’ev (143 votes), Popov (132 votes), Pal’m (73 votes), and Sakharov (69 votes). Popov and Shapovalenko then tried to have one among the quintet made the “main” chairman, or to have the position rotate.⁷⁴ It was a fool’s errand. Yeltsin, Afanas’ev stated, was “the second figure after Gorbachev on the country’s political stage,” but the Interregional group could not be a one-man band. The result was not pleasing to Yeltsin. “A USSR-wide opposition party or movement could at that time only have been a leader-centered one, and the only leader capable of heading it was Yeltsin. But the role the Interregionals were willing to assign, which was not even first among equals but equal to four other leaders, could not have been attractive to him. The MDG showed it was not prepared to be building material for a political organization that would smooth Yeltsin’s road to power.”⁷⁵

For all his eagerness to lead them, Yeltsin’s initial reaction to the Interregional luminaries as people had been one of culture shock. At the summer meetings, he “looked on them as something alien” and did not want to be photographed in their company.⁷⁶ The secretary of the group, the same Arkadii Murashov who cast the objecting vote in the Moscow council in 1987, says Yeltsin kept a sphinx-like silence in caucus and almost never spoke in the steering committee.⁷⁷ Nevertheless, as the only co-chairman to sit in the Supreme Soviet, Yeltsin represented the group’s views in that body. More vitally, he metabolized heretical ideas—by osmosis and in exchanges brokered by Popov, Mikhail Poltoranin, and Murashov, all of whom stressed that interlocutors were never to take a professorial attitude toward him. Yurii Afanas’ev, the economist Nikolai Shmelëv, the aeronautics specialist Yurii Ryzhov, and the theater director Mark Zakharov were among those who found a common language with Yeltsin. Excited to be in out of the cold, Yeltsin awakened to the need to have a modicum of system and coherence in his thoughts.⁷⁸ He was playing with the kind of ideas it had once been his duty as a Communist Party boss to suffocate. What Popov and the Interregionals were now saying about the regime, and Yeltsin with them, was scarcely less damning of Soviet ways than what Yeltsin had execrated the political prisoner Valerian Morozov for saying in Sverdlovsk in 1983. One of Morozov’s misdemeanors had been to go to Gorky in search of the castaway Sakharov, who now, a few years later, was in harness with deputy Yeltsin.

For Popov, the man from Sverdlovsk, warts and all, was the answer to a prayer. He personified the longing for change and had the reassuring quality of hailing from the ranks of the establishment. “We reconnoitered for a very long time, we picked them over. But here in fact was life throwing Yeltsin into our hands. They themselves kicked him out, they themselves made him a renegade.”⁷⁹ Popov was sure Yeltsin would find a way around the queasiness of the intellectuals in the MDG. Any possibility of the saintly Sakharov becoming Russia’s Václav Havel was extinguished when he died of a heart attack on December 14, 1989, at the age of sixty-eight. Yeltsin garnered respect by walking behind the bier in a sleet storm, speaking briefly at Luzhniki, and then going to the graveyard and to the funeral repast. The entente with Russia’s Westernizers was contemporaneous with the fall of the Berlin Wall and of satellite regimes in Eastern Europe in the autumn of 1989. For the first time, Yeltsin’s statements were emphasizing democracy and some species of market economy as facets of “de-monopolization.”

The learning process was accelerated by a whirlwind tour of the United States from September 9 to 17, 1989, sponsored by the Esalen Foundation of California. In New York, Yeltsin did a walkabout in Manhattan, went to the top of the Empire State Building, helicoptered twice around the Statue of Liberty (he was “doubly free,” he told Sukhanov), gave lectures at Columbia University and the Council on Foreign Relations and to Wall Street investors (wowing some and offending others),⁸⁰ and was interviewed on Good Morning, America. He spoke at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the World Affairs Council of Dallas, and the University of Miami, met corporate executives at several stops, wore a white ten-gallon hat in Texas, and stopped in on an Indiana hog farm, the Johnson Space Center, Ronald Reagan’s hospital room at the Mayo Clinic, and a Florida beach house. Yeltsin had been to Western Europe as a representative of the CPSU; this was his first encounter with the United States and his first with any capitalist country as a private citizen.

Itching to establish international credentials, Yeltsin wangled an invitation to the White House office of President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, with the promise of a “drop by” from the president. He had to enter by the West Basement entrance and was waspish with Scowcroft and Scowcroft’s assistant, Condoleezza Rice. Yeltsin lightened up when Bush came by for fifteen minutes of small talk. Vice President Dan Quayle followed and liked him. “He may not have had Gorbachev’s polish, but I could immediately see how confident he was.” Quayle was taken that Yeltsin was well enough briefed to poke fun at the bad press the two of them had been receiving. “My feeling was mixed with a whit of annoyance : Was my press so bad that it made its way to everyone’s attention?”⁸¹ The Russian “emerged from the West Wing to tell the press corps that he had presented Bush and Quayle with a ‘ten-point plan’ to ‘rescue perestroika .’ Inside, Scowcroft complained that Yeltsin was ‘devious’ and a ‘twobit headline-grabber.’” James A. Baker formed a similar appraisal at the State Department.⁸² For Yeltsin, it had been gainful exposure: Much to Gorbachev’s chagrin, he had his foot in the door of official Washington.

Yeltsin was bowled over by the variance between what he saw, communist stereotypes of American life, and the dreariness of Soviet reality. He and his party felt almost like characters in a science fiction novel. “Don’t forget,” Sukhanov wrote about the tour, “that we were travelers from the ‘anti-world’ and in our heads the U.S.A. was the country where universal chaos reigned.”⁸³ They did find some scenes that conformed to their expectations—the filth and overcrowding of the New York subway, for one—but many more that did not.⁸⁴ Yeltsin was most moved by the cornucopia at a Randalls discount supermarket in a suburb of Houston, which he asked to inspect when he saw it next to the expressway between the space center and Love Field. He went over its shelves—video taken by a member of the group shows him examining onions and potatoes under a sign “You Just Can’t Buy It Better”—and to its bar-coded checkout stand, and was in disbelief when the manager said it inventoried “only” 30,000 products. Yeltsin’s eyes were watery as he reboarded the bus. In the air between Houston and Miami, he remarked to Sukhanov that the grocery market for ordinary Americans, far better stocked than VIP dispensaries in Moscow, pointed up the fatuity of the “fairy tales” fed to his generation by Marxist-Leninist propaganda. “They had to deceive the population…. And now it is plain why Soviet citizens were not permitted to go abroad. They [the bosses] were afraid that their eyes would be opened.”⁸⁵

Sukhanov suspected that the exchange aboard the Miami-bound jet was when “the last prop of Yeltsin’s Bolshevik consciousness decomposed,” and with it the vestiges of his belief in the Soviet model.⁸⁶ Asked by a close associate in the 1990s what most turned him against the old system, Yeltsin said it was “America and its supermarkets.”⁸⁷ Yeltsin records the scales falling off his eyes several weeks after the U.S. trip. Aides, seeing him disconsolate after the press skewered his U.S. tour, tried to lift his spirits by organizing a visit to a public steambath in a Moscow district. There were forty nude men in the sultry room, lathering one another on the back with water-soaked birch branches, to improve the circulation. “Hang in there, Boris Nikolayevich,” they cried, “we are with you!” It was then and there, Yeltsin was to claim in Notes of a President, that “I changed my worldview” and came to the understanding “that I had been a communist by Soviet tradition, by inertia, and by upbringing, but not by conviction.”⁸⁸

If ever there was a eureka moment when Yeltsin separated himself from the Soviet state of mind, either the flight from Texas to Florida or the scene in the steambath might have been it. It is more cogent to visualize the shift, cognitive and affective, as cumulative and as taking months rather than hours. Rethinking communism and kissing it good-bye was one of those exercises in “innovative uncommon sense” that, as James MacGregor Burns writes, “transcends routine problem solving to address the deep human needs and crises from which it emerges.”⁸⁹ It happened as the economy of the USSR, beginning in the winter of 1988–89, went from stagnation to recession. Lower production and excessive currency emission disordered consumer markets and made for empty shelves in the stores, longer lines, more squirreling away of consumer staples, barter, and by 1990 spot rationing.⁹⁰ Millions of citizens puzzled it all out in their own way. Gorbachev did, too, but always with a lag and clinging to the dying embers of the faith.⁹¹

Less attached to communism’s ideology and more moved by its failures—more like the members of his children’s generation than like his and Gorbachev’s—Yeltsin passed through the stages of realignment during a liminal period lasting from the summer of 1989 to the summer of 1990. In a few years, he had gone from frowning at Soviet difficulties, to doubts about the system, and onward to assent in a new framework for society and politics.⁹² He had not “become somebody else,” he said when asked in January 1990 to compare his political position in 1990 with 1985–87. “But there has undoubtedly been a change [in me], a change leftward…. I am today disposed toward more radical change than at that time.”⁹³ Reassessment of methods of rule escalated to reassessment of overarching goals and of the paradigm that framed them. In February 1990 Yeltsin would notify British writer Barbara Amiel that he now saw Lenin’s division of world socialism into communist and social-democratic wings in 1919 as a tragedy, and that “in my heart I am really more of a social democrat” than a communist.⁹⁴ In January he was chosen to join the coordinating committee of the Democratic Platform in the CPSU, a ginger group that favored transmuting the Communist Party into a social-democratic movement—with a family resemblance to Labour in Britain or the German SPD—and institutionalization of jostling factions within it. It was a way station on Yeltsin’s road out of the party. He was transiting from the Gorbachev-in-a-hurry he had been in 1986–87, to the Gorbachev-with-a-difference he was in 1988–89, to the forget-about-Gorbachev of 1990–91.

There were off-key notes as Yeltsin’s political reputation grew. About one of them—purported to be a fatal car accident with him behind the wheel—we know only a claim made many years later by a far from neutral observer. Aleksandr Korzhakov, Yeltsin’s former KGB bodyguard, had continued to see the family after November 1987 and after his discharge from the KGB’s Ninth Directorate in February 1989.⁹⁵ He writes in the second edition of his memoirs, published in 2004, eight years after he became Yeltsin’s mortal enemy, that at some point between May 1989 and the spring of 1990 Yeltsin drove his Moskvich into a two-seat motorcycle idling at sunrise on a country road near Korzhakov’s dacha at the village of Molokovo, close by Moscow. Korzhakov had given him driving lessons and found him a slow learner. In the Molokovo accident, the motorbike passenger, Korzhakov claims, was injured and died a half year later without the authorities knowing about the accident and perhaps without Yeltsin himself knowing the man had died. Yeltsin, Korzhakov, and a companion, says Korzhakov, had been drinking at Korzhakov’s dacha the previous evening.⁹⁶ Although a biographer is obliged to note the report, it is an unconvincing one, since Yeltsin was being tailed and wiretapped by KGB officers, and Gorbachev would have pounced on the mere suspicion of such an incident to crucify him politically. Korzhakov did not mention the event in the first edition of his memoirs, published in 1997, or in my interview with him in 2002, and it has been left out of other accounts written in the spirit of his book.⁹⁷ The presumption of innocence must remain with Yeltsin.

The U.S. junket caused Yeltsin more immediate pain. In Miami Beach, Dwayne Andreas of the food-industry conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland, one of the large companies to which Yeltsin was introduced, loaned him the waterfront property at the Sea View Hotel normally occupied by his two daughters. Yeltsin did not know this detail and threw a fit when he found women’s lingerie in the bedroom drawers. Scared that American intelligence was trying to set him up with a call girl and blackmail him, he placed irate calls to his hosts. Robert S. Strauss, the Washington lawyer and political broker, had to spend an hour calming him by telephone.⁹⁸

The greater blight was that Yeltsin attracted unpropitious publicity at several of his ports of call. The tour was originally scheduled for two weeks, but CPSU officials refused to give him an exit visa for more than eight days, since he needed to attend a Central Committee plenum on agricultural policy. James Garrison of Esalen compressed the program into the eight days, saying Yeltsin “would have to sleep less.”⁹⁹ At Johns Hopkins University on September 12, jet lag, sleeping pills, and perhaps the aftereffects of evening-before libations left him the worse for wear. Sukhanov had to admit it was “not his most successful meeting.”¹⁰⁰ The Washington Post’s Paul Hendrickson chronicled “Yeltsin’s Smashing Day” and identified bourbon as the main source of the grief, which was an overstatement if not a falsehood. Hendrickson was a prize-winning feature writer; the Post did not think the Yeltsin story important enough to fly its Moscow bureau chief, David Remnick, in for it. Hendrickson would later be contrite about the piece, but the damage was done. On September 18, the day after Yeltsin landed back in Moscow, Pravda reprinted a five-day-old story by Vittorio Zucconi, the Washington correspondent of the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, portraying the voyage as one long orgy of shopping and drinking. It was a mishmash of a few facts and much fiction and innuendo. Videotape of the Johns Hopkins appearance shown on Soviet television appears to have been doctored to garble Yeltsin’s words. His son-in-law Valerii Okulov delivered a letter from Yeltsin to Pravda denouncing the article as libelous. An outcry in Italy and Russia forced the paper to publish a retraction.¹⁰¹ At the Central Committee plenum shortly afterward, Yeltsin accosted Pravda editor Viktor Afanas’ev for publishing the article. It was too bad, he said about their conversation, “that the time of duels has passed.”¹⁰²

Another barrage of flak was fairer to link to Yeltsin’s behavior. About ten P.M. on September 28, 1989, he showed up drenched and bruised at the guardhouse of the Uspenskoye dacha compound for VIPs, on the Moskva River west of Moscow. He informed police that he had been forced to swim for his life after a carful of thugs waylaid him and dumped him off a bridge with a sack over his head. Yeltsin had been driven from a political rally in Ramenki, the Moscow neighborhood he represented in the city council, bearing two bouquets he took from the meeting, to the dacha of Sergei Bashilov, another construction bureaucrat from Sverdlovsk, with whom he was social. (He had known Bashilov, Yurii Batalin’s predecessor as chairman of Gosstroi, since the 1960s.) Aleksandr Korzhakov, called in by the family, went to the guardhouse, gave Yeltsin a shot of vodka, and took him home. Yeltsin’s purpose in going to Uspenskoye is unclear, as the Bashilovs were not home and their steambath room was locked. Press speculation centered on a tryst, although there is no proof of that and womanizing is a charge his enemies have almost never aimed at him. Speaking the day after to the Soviet interior minister, Vadim Bakatin, he retracted his statement about a plot to drown him. Today Bakatin, in retirement, says Yeltsin was doused in a pond near the dacha (by whom or for what he will not say) and what ensued was a KGB caper to embarrass him.¹⁰³

If that was the plan, it misfired. Bakatin and Gorbachev reported to the Supreme Soviet that the reasons for the incident were not known and that there had been no attempt to murder Yeltsin, and Yeltsin issued a statement fulminating at infringement on his “private life.” Yeltsin called off several public appearances, and some of his amateur helpers, fearing he was losing his touch, had “nervous eruptions verging on frenzy.”¹⁰⁴ But nerves calmed, and the uproar blew over. Korzhakov offered to be his full-time security man and chaperone, to prevent further misadventures. Yeltsin soon perked up and was back on track.¹⁰⁵ Greener pastures beckoned.