9 Third Yeltsin interview.
10 Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire, 112, citing a conversation with Afanas’ev.
11 Grishin was already a candidate member of the Politburo when given the Moscow position in June 1967 and had to wait four years, until the 1971 party congress, before getting his full member’s seat. Yeltsin’s expectations are recounted in Viktor Manyukhin, Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 59–60.
12 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:370–71.
13 Oksana Khimich, “Otchim perestroiki” (Stepfather of perestroika), Moskovskii komsomolets, April 22, 2005.
14 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 95–96. His views on the tenacity of opposition to reform evolved rapidly. In April 1986 he discounted as “completely incorrect” the judgment “that the party has somehow cut itself off from the people.” “Vypiska iz vystupleniya t. Yel’tsina B. N. 11 aprelya s. g. pered propagandistami g. Moskvy” (Extract from the statement of comrade B. N. Yeltsin on April 11, 1986, before Moscow propagandists), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Materialy samizdata, July 18, 1986, 7.
15 Politburo transcript for January 19, 1987, in AGF (Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Moscow), KDPP (Kollektsiya “Kak ‘delalas” politika perestroiki” [The collection “How the policy of perestroika ‘was made’”]), 6 vols., 2:21–46; quotations here at 32–35, 44–46.
16 The transcript records a break in the discussion after Yeltsin’s remarks but gives no details. Yeltsin in his memoirs (Ispoved’, 97) described Gorbachev walking out of a Politburo meeting on his account, but misremembered it as occurring in October 1987.
17 In a never-printed interview in July 1988, Yeltsin said there had been an element of competition with Gorbachev in making his Moscow personnel changes. He added that he wished there had been time to do more and that additional district party secretaries were on his list to be removed. Vladimir Polozhentsev, “Privet, pribaltiitsy!” (Greetings, people from the Baltic), http://podolsk-news.ru/stat/elcin.php.
18 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 11, 97–98.
19 V. I. Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak: iz dnevnika chlena Politbyuro TsK KPSS (But this is how it was: from the diary of a member of the Politburo of the CPSU) (Moscow: Sovet veteranov knigoizdaniya, 1995), 123. For more on Gorbachev’s reaction, see Vadim Medvedev, V komande Gorbacheva: vzglyad iznutri (In the Gorbachev team: a view from within) (Moscow: Bylina, 1994), 45–47; and V. I. Boldin, Krusheniye p’edestala: shtrikhi k portretu M. S. Gorbacheva (Smashing the pedestaclass="underline" strokes of a portrait of M. S. Gorbachev) (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 326. George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 117, surmises that Yeltsin was unhappy that Gorbachev settled for a closing resolution by the January plenum of the Central Committee that was less radical than Yeltsin preferred. It is a good point, but the Politburo records show the men were in conflict before the committee convened.
20 Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak, 123.
21 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 11–12.
22 Politburo transcripts, March 24, 1987 (AGF, KDPP, 2:154–55); April 23, 1987 (ibid., 241–42); April 30, 1987 (ibid., 264); May 14, 1987 (ibid., 305, 317–18); September 28, (ibid., 539).
23 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:368.
24 Politburo transcript, October 15, 1987, in Volkogonov Archive (Project on Cold War Studies, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University). All quotations here are at 138–40.
25 Vladimir Gubarev, “Akademik Gennadii Mesyats: beregite intellekt” (Academician Gennadii Mesyats: conserve your intellect), Gudok, October 12, 2005.
26 Yeltsin, however, did manage to keep Ligachëv’s men at bay most of the time. At the plenum of the city committee that removed Yeltsin from his job in November 1987, one member of the bureau, N. Ye. Kislova, noted that Central Committee workers had not recently dropped in on bureau meetings and that she could not remember an instance of a formal visit by a central CPSU official even at the level of subdepartment head. “Energichno vesti perestroiku” (Energetically carry out perestroika), Pravda, November 13, 1987.
27 Speech to Central Committee, June 25, 1987, in RGANI (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, Moscow) (microform in Harvard College Library), fund 2, register 5, file 58, 33–34.
28 Nikolai Ryzhkov, interview with the author (September 21, 2001).
29 Mikhail Poltoranin, interview with the author (July 11, 2001).
30 Yakovlev, Sumerki, 407. Plans for such a site were discussed at the August meeting of informal organizations, which Yeltsin had authorized. One delegate proposed it be located in the Arbat area, in downtown Moscow. A district-level Communist Party official in attendance opposed the idea: “Why does the Party need a Hyde Park at which it will be permitted to speak out on equal terms with you?” John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 74.
31 Politburo transcript, September 10, 1987 (AGF, KDPP, 2:507–8).
32 Ye. I. Chazov, Rok (Fate) (Moscow: Geotar-Med, 2001), 218–19.
33 Valerii Saikin, interview with the author (June 15, 2001).
34 Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007).
35 All quotations from the letter are taken from Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 8–11 (italics added). An English translation, leaving out some details, is in Boris Yeltsin, Against the Grain: An Autobiography, trans. Michael Glenny (New York: Summit Books, 1990), 178–81.
36 Gorbachev made his claim to the CPSU conference in the summer of 1988, and Yeltsin made his in Ispoved’. The aide who was with Gorbachev during the phone call says Gorbachev told him after putting down the phone that Yeltsin “agreed he would not get nervous before the holidays,” which suggests partial acquiescence in Gorbachev’s preferred timing. A. S. Chernyayev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym (Six years with Gorbachev) (Moscow: Progress, 1993), 175.
37 See Ispoved’, 13–14. Yeltsin did not bring up this point in our 2002 interview about these events.
38 Poltoranin interview.
39 Third Yeltsin interview.
40 At the October plenum, Gorbachev leveled the charge that Yeltsin had used this and similar meetings “to find accomplices” (naiti yedinomyshlennikov), but did not claim that Yeltsin had contacted Central Committee members in between plenums. “Plenum TsK KPSS—oktyabr’ 1987 goda (stenograficheskii otchët)” (The CPSU Central Committee plenum of October 1987 [stenographic record]), Izvestiya TsK KPSS, February 1989, 284. To me, Yeltsin said flatly that he did not speak to potential supporters, in person or by telephone, before the plenum.
41 Third Yeltsin interview.
42 The first interpretation of Gorbachev’s motives is stressed in the eyewitness account by the then-first deputy head of the party’s international department. Karen Brutents, Nesbyvsheyesya: neravnodushnyye zametki o perestroike (It never came true: engaged notes about perestroika) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyye otnosheniya, 2005), 100–101. The second is favored by then-Politburo member Vitalii Vorotnikov, in A bylo eto tak, 169–70. Tret’yakov offers a variation on Brutents’s thesis, that Gorbachev had already decided to discharge Yeltsin and wanted him to fire at party conservatives on the way out the door. See Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka,” part 5, Politicheskii klass, June 2006, 99–100.