73 Yakov Ryabov, interview in files of Central Committee Interview Project, University of Glasgow (transcript supplied by Stephen White). He recalled discussing the need to replace Nikolayev with Brezhnev and Ivan Kapitonov of the Secretariat, but did not mention Kirilenko.
74 Oleg Podberëzin, formerly a Sverdlovsk party worker, interview with the author (September 9, 2004). Ryabov had been appointed party secretary of the turbine works in 1958 and of a district of Sverdlovsk city in 1960. He was active in Komsomol affairs from 1946 to the mid-1950s.
75 TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 116, file 283, 14.
76 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 44. As documented in the archive, he was “elected” to the Chkalov district soviet in 1963, the Sverdlovsk city soviet in 1965, and the city committee of the party in 1966. Once on the obkom staff, he joined the soviet and party committee of the oblast.
77 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 34–35.
78 Ibid., 35.
79 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 44.
80 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 253.
81 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 41.
82 Oleg Lobov, interview with the author (May 29, 2002).
83 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 35.
84 Aron, Yeltsin, 43–44.
85 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 38.
86 Details on motivations here from Ryabov interview (University of Glasgow).
87 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 40.
88 In ibid., 40–41, Ryabov reprints a five-point summary from his diary of a conversation in June 1976 in which he let into Yeltsin for sharply worded instructions, superciliousness, disrespect for fellow communists (“including members of the bureau of the obkom”), and taking criticism as an insult. Every time they had such a conversation, Ryabov says, Yeltsin protested that his rudeness was only out of zeal to get the job done and promised to be more correct in future. “This way Boris won me over and calmed me.”
89 Ryabov interview (University of Glasgow).
90 I heard about Ponomarëv’s attempt from a then member of the bureau who wishes to go unnamed. Confirmation of the Bobykin-Yeltsin rivalry may be found in the memoir by Viktor Manyukhin, a contemporary of Yeltsin’s in the Sverdlovsk party apparatus: Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 34–35. Some bureau members certainly preferred Yeltsin. Ryabov (interview, University of Glasgow) identifies Korovin, secretary N. M. Dudkin, the commander of the local military district, and the tradeunion chief as in favor and says that even in 1975 “several secretaries” preferred that Yeltsin be made second secretary, over Korovin’s head.
91 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 54–55; Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 48–49. Yeltsin mentions Ryabov attending some of the meetings, but breathes not a word of his sponsorship.
92 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 49–50.
CHAPTER FOUR
1 “Law-and-order prefects” and “developmental prefects” (below) are taken from Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party Organs in Industrial Decision-Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 5.
2 The instructions, signed by Yeltsin in November 1981 and stamped “Top Secret,” are in TsDOOSO (Documentation Center for the Public Organizations of Sverdlovsk Oblast, Yekaterinburg), fund 4, register 100, file 119, 135–36. On Yeltsin and Kornilov, see Viktor Manyukhin, Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 71–73.
3 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 60.
4 That figure, coming to 32.5 percent of industrial employment in the oblast, was inferred from classified data for 1985. It does not include personnel in R&D or defense-related tasks done in plants subordinated to civilian ministries (Uralmash, for example). Brenda Horrigan, “How Many People Worked in the Soviet Defense Industry?” RFE/RL Research Report 1 (August 21, 1992), 33–39.
5 On Compound No. 19, see Anthony Rimmington, “From Military to Industrial Complex? The Conversion of Biological Weapons Facilities in the Russian Federation,” Contemporary Security Policy 17 (April 1996), 81–112; Jeanne Guillemin, Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Ken Alibek, with Stephen Handelman, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World (New York: Random House, 1999), chap. 7. Some analysts have charged the United States with making as much use of Japanese technology as the Soviets did. See Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover-Up, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2002).
6 A. D. Kirillov and N. N. Popov, Uraclass="underline" vek dvadtsatyi (The Urals: the twentieth century) (Yekaterinburg: Ural’skii rabochii, 2000), 180.
7 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 55.
8 Bobykin was transferred to a Central Committee department in 1978. He returned to Sverdlovsk as obkom first secretary in June 1988, when Yeltsin was in political disfavor, and was removed in February 1990.
9 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 32.
10 Grigorii Kaëta, who at this point was an official in the obkom’s propaganda department, interview with the author (September 9, 2004). Mekhrentsev, a war veteran, had been a party member since 1946. He was a deputy in the Supreme Soviet and had been awarded two Orders of Lenin and a USSR State Prize. He died in January 1985 at the age of sixty and rated an obituary in Pravda. Yeltsin was one of the officials who signed it, as a mark of respect. Mekhrentsev’s replacement as chairman of the province’s government was Oleg Lobov.
11 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 37–39.
12 This last phenomenon is reported in Kaleriya Shadrina, “Yel’tsin byl krut: soratniki perezhidali yego gnev v spetsbol’nitse” (Yeltsin was gruff: his brothers-in-arms thought about his anger in the special hospital), Komsomol’skaya pravda, November 25, 1997.
13 Pilar Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya: Boris Yel’tsin, provintsial v Kremle” (The impossible Russia: Boris Yeltsin, a provincial in the Kremlin), Ural, April 1994, 100. This incident seems to have happened in 1984.
14 Rossel, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 1. Rossel was appointed head of a more important building organization in 1981 and deputy head of the construction directorate for the oblast in 1983.
15 The case was initially a disappearance, with no one knowing what had become of Titov. His body was found outside of town several months later, with the pistol next to it. The KGB eventually ruled the death a suicide and a personal affair with no political aspect. Source: interviews with former obkom officials.
16 Viktor Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000).
17 Interview with Ryabov, Central Committee Interview Project, University of Glasgow (transcript supplied by Stephen White). Ryabov went so far as to say in this interview that Yeltsin “was fully under my influence” in the late 1970s.
18 What Ryabov said in Nizhnii Tagil, after being asked about Brezhnev, was that the Politburo and Secretariat were quite capable of “covering for an ailing leader.” The incident is described in Yakov Ryabov, Moi XX vek: zapiski byvshego sekretarya TsK KPSS (My 20th century: notes of a former secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU) (Moscow: Russkii biograficheskii institut, 2000), 129–30. He mentioned Kornilov’s likely role only in the University of Glasgow interview. In 1971 Ryabov had pushed for serial production of the T-72 main battle tank in Nizhnii Tagil; Ustinov preferred a model made in Kharkov, Ukraine. Brezhnev eventually settled the matter in Ryabov’s and Sverdlovsk’s favor.