91 Plans for the meeting with the students are contained in TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 100, file 275, and the questions and answers are in file 116 (quotation about capitalist competition at 136). Aron, Yeltsin, 87–92, gives a good account of the meeting.
92 Yel’tsin, Srednii Ural, 101–2; Aron, Yeltsin, 78–80.
93 TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 101, file 106, 3.
94 Ibid., register 107, file 118, 39.
95 Ibid., 37–42.
96 Ibid., register 101, file 105, 116.
97 Anatolii Kirillov, interview with the author (June 21, 2004).
98 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 56.
99 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 53.
100 Ibid., 22.
101 Second Yeltsin interview. Compare to Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 53: “We found ourselves working, practically speaking, in almost total self-reliance [samostoyatel’nost’].”
CHAPTER FIVE
1 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 67–69.
2 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), 37–38. Ryabov mentions Yeltsin fielding suggestions to become secretary of the party obkom of Kostroma province and, in Moscow, deputy head of Gosstroi, the State Construction Committee. The second organization is where Yeltsin was to be sent after his break with Gorbachev in 1987.
3 Interview with Yakov Ryabov, Central Committee Interview Project, University of Glasgow (transcript supplied by Stephen White).
4 Calculated from lists at http://www.worldstatesmen.org/RussSFSR_admin.html. We have only years of birth, not exact dates, for most of the secretaries. Five of the 1976 first secretaries had been born in 1931, the same year as Yeltsin.
5 “Vstrecha v VKSh, 12 noyabrya 1988 goda s 14 do 18 chasov” (Meeting in the Higher Komsomol School, November 12, 1988, from 2:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M.), in RGANI (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, Moscow) (microform in Harvard College Library), fund 89, register 8, file 29, 41. Yeltsin said in this presentation that the two met twice, but it was unclear whether that was twice overall or twice during Andropov’s general secretaryship. My suspicion is that it was the former. Assuming they conferred after the anthrax incident in 1979, they likely had one meeting while Andropov was Soviet leader.
6 Ye. K. Ligachëv, Predosterezheniye (Warning) (Moscow: Pravda International, 1998), 410.
7 Arkadii Vol’skii, interview with the author (June 13, 2000); Ligachëv, Predosterezheniye, 410.
8 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:291–92. As he often does, Gorbachev imputes to third parties the gossip about Yeltsin drinking, in this case “the observation” that he left a Supreme Soviet session on somebody’s arm. “Many people were upset—what was it? Well-wishers offered assurances that nothing special had occurred, it was just a little rise in his blood pressure. But [Sverdlovsk] natives smirked: This happens with our first secretary; sometimes he overdoes it a bit.”
9 Aleksandr Budberg, “Proigravshii pobeditel’: Mikhailu Gorbachevu—75” (Losing victor: Mikhail Gorbachev at 75), Moskovskii komsomolets, March 3, 2006.
10 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 67. While Yeltsin says he took “one or two seconds” to say no to Dolgikh, he also relates that he barely slept a wink that night and expected to hear from someone else shortly.
11 Tatyana Yumasheva, first interview with the author (July 15, 2001). When Tatyana first moved to Moscow in 1977, the only family friend her parents had there was one female classmate from UPI, who lived in a communal apartment. Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 337.
12 Yeltsin’s favorite folk song was “Ural’skaya ryabinushka” (Urals Mountain Ash). In his third book of memoirs (Marafon, 183), Yeltsin mentioned his preference as a young man for the lilting compositions of Isaak Dunayevskii (1900–55), Mark Fradkin (1914–90), who was mainly a writer of movie scores, and the much decorated Aleksandra Pakhmutova (1929–), who was said to be Leonid Brezhnev’s favorite songwriter. The English translation of Yeltsin’s memoir, perhaps trying to make him look hipper, drops Pakhmutova from the listing and adds guitar-strumming troubadours Bulat Okudzhava (1924–97) and Yurii Vizbor (1934–84).
13 See Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 56–58. Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka” (Sverdlovsk upstart), part 3, Politicheskii klass, April 2006, 87, points out a “comradely” tradition in the Politburo of addressing one another as ty. Yeltsin was not aware of it and never ascribed this tendency to any member of the inner elite other than Gorbachev.
14 Grigorii Kaëta, a member of the bureau at the time, interview with the author (September 9, 2004).
15 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 71.
16 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 56.
17 The city of Tomsk is 1,100 miles east of Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) and, like it, was closed to foreigners until 1990. This was because of secrecy surrounding the Tomsk-7 chemical combine, the USSR’s largest complex for producing weaponsgrade plutonium.
18 Viktor Manyukhin, Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 54–56.
19 Kaëta interview.
20 Pilar Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya: Boris Yel’tsin, provintsial v Kremle” (The impossible Russia: Boris Yeltsin, a provincial in the Kremlin), Ural, April 1994, 105–6.
21 Stanislav Alekseyev, a party propagandist in Sverdlovsk at the time, interview with the author (June 24, 2004).
22 Manyukhin, Yeltsin’s last second secretary in Sverdlovsk, says (Pryzhok, 56) that Ligachëv at some point told Yeltsin he was going to be made a Central Committee secretary, and that Gorbachev forced the appointment to be made at the department level.
23 Gorbachev writes in Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:292, that, when the Politburo resolution appointing Yeltsin to the construction department was being drafted, the two had “a short conversation” in his office. “It has not stuck in my memory,” he adds snootily.
24 Kaëta interview.
25 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy,1:292.
26 Yelena’s husband, Valerii Okulov, was reassigned to overseas Aeroflot flights, a nice promotion. Following Boris Yeltsin’s demotion in 1987, Okulov was not allowed to fly at all for three years.
27 Politburo transcript for June 29, 1985, in APRF (Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, Moscow), fund 3, register 3194, file 22, 8–9. I do not know why Tikhonov should have been so unimpressed. In the first volume of his memoirs (Ispoved’, 54–55), Yeltsin states that as Sverdlovsk leader he had “normal, businesslike” relations with Tikhonov from 1980 to 1985. It could be that Tikhonov’s ire was directed at Gorbachev as much as at Yeltsin.
28 He was never anyone’s deputy and had no desire to be one now, Yeltsin wrote in Ispoved’, 70. The first assertion is only partly true. He had never carried the precise title of deputy (zamestitel’), but as head engineer of two construction concerns in the early 1960s he reported to the director. And from 1968 to 1975, as head of the construction department of the Sverdlovsk obkom, he answered to the first secretary through one of the secretaries—just as it was with Dolgikh in the Central Committee apparatus from April to July 1985. In ibid., 110, Yeltsin asserts that Dolgikh, finding him “sometimes too emotional,” tried to block his promotion to Central Committee secretary at the Politburo meeting of June 29. The transcript of the meeting, however, shows Dolgikh as supporting the decision. Yeltsin also reports that he and Dolgikh served together amicably after that, which does seem to have been the case. Dolgikh was ousted from the Politburo and Secretariat in September 1988.