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.
43 Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak, 169.
44 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:372.
45 In his diary of events, Anatolii Chernyayev had already likened Yeltsin’s address before the Moscow city conference of the CPSU, in January 1986, to the Khrushchev speech (Chernyayev, Shest’ let, 63). But I think the October 1987 speech fits the bill much better. It had incomparably more impact, and the 1986 speech was not secret.
46 All quotations from Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 131–33.
47 The previous spring, the Moscow gorkom and government, wanting to economize on land and labor, had resolved to trim institutes from 1,041 to 1,002. When Yeltsin addressed the Central Committee, seven institutes had been liquidated and fifty-three new ones created, taking the total to 1,087, or 4 percent more than when the campaign started.
48 The phrase “cult of personality” (kul’t lichnosti) was censored out of the official transcript released in 1989 but is present in Yeltsin’s rendering of the speech in Ispoved’, 132. The official record from 1989 does, though, contain the critique by Gorbachev of Yeltsin’s use of the unprintable phrase.
49 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 133.