Yeltsin needed a mentor. He was on good terms with the head of the construction department of the party gorkom, Boris Kiselëv, a former UPI classmate. Kiselëv saw promise in Yeltsin and introduced him to the party apparatus.70 But the crucial patron was Ryabov. Born in 1928 in the province of Penza, Ryabov labored at the bench in the Urals Turbine Works, assembling diesel engines for tanks, and took his UPI diploma in mechanical engineering by correspondence. Bantam-sized, he was as much of a go-getter as Yeltsin but had a loutish edge. The teenaged Tatyana Yeltsina saw him as one of the more unpleasant of her father’s associates and was slightly afraid of him.71 Ryabov was drawn into work in the CPSU apparatus in 1960 by Andrei Kirilenko, an outsider from the Ukrainian party machine who had been first secretary of the Sverdlovsk obkom—oblast committee of the party—since 1955. Kirilenko drew praise from Nikita Khrushchev for sharply increasing shipments of meat to the central authorities. He did so by ordering the slaughter of calves, lambs, and piglets, which then depressed production in the region for a decade. Yeltsin would later describe Kirilenko’s part in the meat scam as shameful. “Kirilenko is still known for this. People have forgotten any good things he did [in Sverdlovsk], but this kind of thing is not forgotten.”72
Khrushchev and his then deputy, Leonid Brezhnev, brought Kirilenko back to Moscow in 1962 for a position in the Central Committee Secretariat. His replacement in Sverdlovsk, on Kirilenko’s recommendation, was Konstantin Nikolayev, a local who graduated from the UPI construction division in the 1930s and was secretary of the institute’s party committee during the war. Nikolayev, a 300-pound diabetic, depended heavily on Ryabov because of his disabilities and promoted him in 1966 to second secretary of the obkom. In January 1971 Nikolayev retired and Ryabov took over as first secretary; Nikolayev died several months later. Kirilenko, as a member of the Politburo, seems not to have figured in the decision, although he kept a hand in Sverdlovsk politics until 1982. Ryabov was happy Moscow accepted the need for an industrial expert and Urals man to have the job and not to repeat the experience of sending in a varyag (Viking) like Kirilenko.73
You would never know Yeltsin’s dependence on Ryabov from the Yeltsin memoirs, which hardly mention him. Yeltsin was not one to concede indebtedness to another, and this feeling was strengthened in Ryabov’s case by their rupture of relations in 1987, when Ryabov took part in the attack on Yeltsin as Mikhail Gorbachev pushed him out of his high position.
Ryabov made up his mind in April 1968 to recruit Yeltsin into the regional party apparatus. He wanted to turn a page in the obkom’s department for construction, which had been run for years by the ineffective Aleksei Guseletov. When Ryabov raised Yeltsin as a potential head, some functionaries, aware of the belatedness of his admittance into the CPSU and of his past noninvolvement in Komsomol and party activity, were dumbfounded. The least Yeltsin could do, they thought, was earn his party spurs at the factory or district level, as Ryabov had.74 They may not have known that he had paid his dues the past five years on nominally elected “soviets” (legislative councils) and local party committees or that a 1966 review of his work appreciated him as “politically literate” (politicheski gramotnyi), taking part in public service, and “having authority” in the collective.75 In his memoir account, Yeltsin specifically links his 1968 appointment to his political activities: “I was not especially surprised to receive this offer, since I had been engaged constantly in public service.”76 Partocrats consulted by Ryabov objected that Yeltsin was headstrong and abrasive. Ryabov would not leave it at that. “I asked, ‘And how do you assess him from a work perspective?’ They gave it some thought and answered, ‘Here there are no problems. He… will carry out what the leadership assigns him to do.’” No powderpuff himself, Ryabov swore he would get the most out of Yeltsin and, “if he were ‘to kick off the traces,’ would put him in his place.”77 He was not the last to think he could domesticate Yeltsin and harness him for his purposes.
Ryabov ran the appointment by Nikolayev and made the overture to Yeltsin. “To be objective about it, he was not dying to have this job,” writes Ryabov, “but after our chat he gave his agreement.”78 Yeltsin says parsimoniously that he consented for no better reason than he “felt like taking a new step.”79 But he did not do it on a lark. He knew full well that it was a wise career move—onward to fresh experiences and upward in the pyramid of power. “I became not merely a boss but a man of power. I threw myself into a party career as I had once thrown myself into hitting the volleyball.”80
Sverdlovsk oblast’s party committee and regional government were in a lowslung building on Lenin Prospect, across the Town Pond from where Vasilii Tatishchev established his ironworks in the eighteenth century. An Orthodox cathedral was demolished to make way for it in the 1930s. The six-man construction department was one of several offices the obkom, as in other provincial capitals, had for palliating the numberless frictions and contradictions built into the Soviet planned economy. It acted as a watchdog on personnel, oversaw the logistics for mundane and showcase projects, and encouraged “socialist competition” among work units to outdo one another in attaining output targets. Yeltsin considered this meddling in line management unexceptionable. By hook or by crook, “with the aid of pumped-up resolutions, reproofs, and whatnot,” the party organs would take care of nuts-and-bolts problems. “This was the gist of the existing system, and it raised no questions.”81
The first half of the 1970s were the last time the economy of the Soviet Union, buoyed by high world oil prices, met its growth norms. The fledgling party worker met his in spades. Yeltsin prided himself, as in SU-13 and the DSK, on an orderly work environment. Making a sales pitch to a young engineer, Oleg Lobov, to sign on as his deputy in 1972, he called the department “a structure in which discipline has been maintained,” not disguising that he viewed it as wilting elsewhere.82 Yeltsin would work nonstop as a troubleshooter, as he did in 1973 during completion of a cold-rolling mill (a mill for reprocessing plate and sheet metal to make it thinner and harder) at the Upper Iset Works. For this exploit, which involved 15,000 workers and intercessions with head offices in Moscow, he won an Order of the Red Banner of Labor, his second. Yeltsin “worked conscientiously and responsibly,” Ryabov was to relate—no mean encomium in a book written a decade after the two fell out.83
Yeltsin also had a nose for publicity. In 1970 he had builders retread his earlier experiment of putting up an apartment house in five days, and went one better by organizing a national conference on “the scientific organization of labor” around the project.84 He butted into projects to be commissioned and was at Nikolayev’s or Ryabov’s side when the ribbon was cut. Yeltsin even listened to advice from Ryabov on softening his manner. “He changed tactics in his bearing and started to foster sociable ties with his colleagues in the obkom [staff] and to put out feelers to the members of the bureau, the obkom secretaries, the oblast executive panel, and other well-placed cadres.”85 Yeltsin was not on a particularly fast track. He occupied the same departmental position in the obkom apparatus for seven years, which was as long as it took him to progress from foreman to chief of SU-13.
Here a providential event interceded. In the spring of 1975 Eduard Shevardnadze, the party boss in the Caucasus republic of Georgia, asked for and received the Politburo’s permission to hire away Gennadii Kolbin, the second secretary in Sverdlovsk and heir presumptive to Ryabov, as his second-ranking secretary in Tbilisi. Ryabov’s preferred candidate for second secretary, Vyacheslav Bayev, the head of the obkom’s machine-building department, was happy where he was and not tempted by the offer. Ryabov then approached Yevgenii Korovin, the secretary for industry, a diffident and sickly official from Kamensk-Ural’skii, who recommended Yeltsin—a mere department head—for the position. “He told me he could not handle it, it would be hard on him, but Boris Nikolayevich was high-powered and assertive, and I would be good in a secondary role.” Ryabov thought Yeltsin lacked the experience, and accepted a compromise recommended by Kolbin: that Korovin be made second secretary and Yeltsin be made one of the five obkom secretaries. Yeltsin may have expected more, but accepted. His new portfolio took in the forest and pulp-and-paper industries as well as construction, and he was given a seat on the bureau, the obkom board comprising ten to twelve party and state officials.86