Force of personality amplified administrative levers. A strapping six foot two, 220 pounds by the 1970s, his hair parted on the right into a formidable cowlick, First Secretary Yeltsin oozed vlast’, that untranslatable Russian epithet for power and rule. He enunciated laconically and emphatically in a husky baritone. He elongated his syllables—as his classmates in Berezniki had noticed—flattened his vowels, and thrummed his r’s in the Urals manner. Interest was added by either picking up the pace or pausing for dramatic effect. When riled at windy speeches or untoward news, he would raise an eyebrow—as teacher Antonina Khonina saw in the 1940s—poke a pencil through the forefinger and little finger of his right hand, and rat-a-tat-tat it; should they persist, he whammed his hand on the desk or lectern and snapped the pencil into thirds.
A ward in Sverdlovsk’s Hospital No. 2 was put on standby before plenums of the obkom, as insurance against an acerbic report from the rostrum—one that “really made the malachite ashtrays quiver”—putting any members in need of therapy.12 A spit-and-polish dress code prevailed. The chief wore a two-piece suit, with necktie and tie clip, and had his shoes burnished to a glint. Heaven help the clerk or factory manager who did not wear a tie, even on the muggiest summer day, or who stood before Yeltsin with hands in his pockets: He would be sent home without ado.
It was not wise to cross the boss on substance. Ural’skii rabochii, the Sverdlovsk daily newspaper, ran a story about a Yeltsin visit to a local factory that rubbed the first secretary the wrong way. “We gave it [the newspaper] to you,” Yeltsin threw at editor-in-chief Grigorii Kaëta, “and we can take it away.” Yeltsin’s smoldering glare cut into Kaëta “like a knife.”13 Engineer Eduard Rossel was chief of the Nizhnii Tagil construction combine in 1978 and was asked by Yeltsin to take on the job of mayor of that city. Rossel said he preferred to stay put. Yeltsin was tight-lipped for a full sixty seconds—an eon to Rossel, who was only six years younger but very much the junior player—splintered his pencil, and blurted out ill-naturedly, “Very well, Eduard Ergartovich, I won’t forget your refusal.”14 Both Kaëta and Rossel found, though, that if they patiently accepted the talking to and did their work well, it was possible to get out of the doghouse. Kaëta remained as editor until after Yeltsin’s departure for Moscow. Rossel got several promotions from him and after communism was to be elected governor of Sverdlovsk oblast.
Ex officio, Yeltsin was his bailiwick’s spokesman in USSR-wide politics. As its unwritten rules prescribed, he was elected without opposition to the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union’s rubber-stamp parliament, in 1978. (Andrei Kirilenko continued to occupy another seat from Sverdlovsk oblast.) In February 1981 Yeltsin made his first speech to a quinquennial party convention in Moscow, the Twenty-Fifth CPSU Congress. He was on pins and needles, as the KGB was looking into the suicide of Vladimir Titov, a key operative on his staff, several days before. Titov, the head of the obkom’s “general department,” which answered for confidential records and correspondence, shot himself with a pistol he kept in his office safe, and some secret materials were missing. Yeltsin had to return to Sverdlovsk midway through the congress to meet with officers.15 On the congress’s last day, Yeltsin was selected to the CPSU Central Committee, whose plenums he had been attending and speaking at since 1976 as a guest (and which Mikhail Gorbachev had joined in 1971). He met on a regular basis with members of the “Sverdlovsk diaspora,” officials from the province who had been transferred to Moscow. In bureaucratic encounters, he had the reputation of someone who was as good as his word and was a bulldog guardian of his home turf. Viktor Chernomyrdin, who was to be Russian prime minister in the 1990s, met up with him on gas pipeline projects in the early 1980s and was struck by his addiction to speaking first, assertively, at meetings with central officials.16
Yeltsin and Yakov Ryabov, his predecessor and booster, were at first in frequent contact. “He often phoned me,” Ryabov said, “and sought my advice on all serious questions.” When Yeltsin was in Moscow, he visited Ryabov at his Central Committee office and dacha. “We had a friendship that was not only official but informal, family.”17 In February 1979 Ryabov tripped up politically over unguarded comments on Brezhnev’s medical condition. He made them in Yeltsin’s presence at a semipublic meeting in Nizhnii Tagil and, says Ryabov, someone passed them on to Brezhnev—he believed it was Yurii Kornilov, the general in charge of the Sverdlovsk oblast KGB. His words were then used by the defense minister of the USSR, Dmitrii Ustinov, to turn Brezhnev against Ryabov. Ustinov had earlier held Ryabov’s slot in the Central Committee Secretariat, where he had several disputes with him about tank production; he had wanted the position for one of his clients in 1976 and saw Ryabov as a threat. Within a week, Brezhnev informed Ryabov he was being bumped to a position in Gosplan, the state planning committee. Ryabov was officially removed from the Secretariat at the Central Committee plenum of April 17, 1979.18 He served as first deputy chairman of Gosplan until 1983 and subsequently as minister of foreign trade, deputy premier, and Soviet ambassador to Paris—significant posts all, but mediocre compared to the appointment he held from 1976 to 1979.
Yeltsin, his ties to Ryabov common knowledge, feared for his own seat. “Boris Nikolayevich took Ryabov’s failure badly” and had “long conversations in the evenings” at his dacha with Sverdlovsk colleagues. Yeltsin appreciated that the fall of Ryabov “would for some time close off the road… out of Sverdlovsk,” and was on his guard.19 Two months after the firing of Ryabov came the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak, in which Marshal Ustinov was also a player. Yeltsin “was so enraged by the lack of cooperation he received [from the military] that he stormed over to Compound [No.] 19 and demanded entry.” He was excluded on the personal order of Ustinov. As a Politburo member who had known Stalin, Ustinov “far outranked a provincial party boss.”20 Yeltsin was to contend in a press interview in 1992 that the matter did not stop there. He went to see Yurii Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, in his office on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. According to Yeltsin, Andropov “phoned Ustinov and ordered him to take this facility down.” Andropov could not literally have given an order to Ustinov, his political equal, but could have pressed him to make the decision—or the scene could have been flimflam put on for Yeltsin’s benefit. In any event, it was Yeltsin’s understanding that Andropov had interceded and the program was discontinued. He found out in the 1980s that it was only moved elsewhere.21 The germ-processing plant was evacuated to the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan and Compound No. 19 was continued as a proving range and storage dump. Yeltsin as leader of post-Soviet Russia was to inform U.S. President George H. W. Bush in February 1992 of the full story.
Not without guile, the vulnerable Yeltsin protected himself by turning to Andrei Kirilenko, the crony of Brezhnev’s who had been Sverdlovsk first secretary before Konstantin Nikolayev and Ryabov. Ryabov had looked up Kirilenko when Brezhnev gave him the bad news; Kirilenko was shocked and seemed to fear that he, too, would feel the effects.22 But Kirilenko’s high offices and long links to Brezhnev—they first worked together in Ukraine in the 1940s—kept him in the game until Brezhnev’s death in 1982. Kirilenko advocated as a priority continued investment in heavy industry and was not popular in the Sverdlovsk elite. Neither those problems nor the encroaching senility of Uncle Andrei, the obkom staffers’ moniker for him, deterred Yeltsin from paying recurring visits and tracking him down every year for a telephone call on his birthday, September 8.23