Where he had wiggle room, Yeltsin made extensive use of the tool kit of the communist state to improve physical and social infrastructure and consumer welfare. He addressed these issues because of a desire to do the right thing, because he liked playing sugar daddy, and because, in a flip of his dictum in the construction industry (“Whoever worked better would live better”), he felt that employees who lived better would put out more in their work for the state. A partial list of Yeltsin’s projects would take in: a start on a subway for the city of Sverdlovsk; eradication of its squalid barracks housing; near-completion of a south-north road artery through Nizhnii Tagil to Serov (this project began under Nikolayev in the 1960s, and Ryabov had been unable to complete it); “youth housing complexes” which gave younger families first crack at apartments and down payments, on condition of putting in two years of labor on the construction; pressure on heavy and defense industry to manufacture scarce household goods;63 new theaters and a circus in Sverdlovsk and refurbishment of the 1912 opera house; a line for the province in the agricultural program for the Non–Black Soil Zone of European Russia (an acrobatic feat, since Sverdlovsk oblast is not in European Russia); and a City Day festival in Sverdlovsk, instituted in 1978, and neighborhood fairs to distribute food and consumer wares before winter. Yeltsin borrowed good ideas from others. The youth housing complexes had been pioneered in Moscow oblast; he tweaked the model by reserving spots for blue-collar workers, invalids, and army officers. The first City Day had been organized in Nizhnii Tagil in 1976 by Yurii Petrov. Compared to the world-shaking decisions Yeltsin was to be privy to after 1985, this may seem like small potatoes; to those affected, it was not.
Ventures like these would make headway only if clearances and means not written into the binding economic plan could be procured. For getting to the Soviet pork barrel, Yeltsin’s intensity and connections were irreplaceable. “For our industrial province I hauled in from the center freight cars full of meat, butter, and other foods,” he says. “I telephoned, demanded, strongarmed.” He did the same for housing.64 His critics do not deny his deftness. Manyukhin pays homage to him for “beating out resources from the center” for local initiatives and extra goods and medicines. When push came to shove, “Boris Nikolayevich went all the way up to the general secretary.”65
Yeltsin’s worldview did evolve in the late Soviet period. To a degree, the evolution was intellectually based. He and Naina subscribed to five or six of the monthly “thick journals.” He had begun signing up for series of literary books while still a student at UPI, and the family continued this practice. The home library they kept on handmade shelves in his apartment study was to number some 6,000 volumes when they shipped it to Moscow in 1985. He often initiated discussions at the office about those social questions that could be debated in the Soviet media.66 Yeltsin even familiarized himself with a few dissident works. He told me that in the late 1970s he read The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s unmasking of Stalinist cruelties (published in the West in 1973 but not in Russia until 1989), in a samizdat (underground) typescript that he got through his wife, who obtained it at work. When I asked him whether the KGB was aware of his reading, he replied, “Of course not. How would they know? They weren’t looking in my direction.”67 Yeltsin began to open up at reunions of old UPI classmates and with others about the misfortunes of his family in the Stalin period. The travel to foreign shores for which his position qualified him also helped widen his horizons. Andrei Goryun reports that as long ago as the late 1960s, having arrived back from his first Western trip, to France, Yeltsin told associates in the Sverdlovsk House-Building Combine about how the capitalist economy was humming along there, and that he was “very strictly warned” to watch his tongue.68 Naina Yeltsina’s opinions contained seeds of doubt similar to his. “We are all children of the system,” she said to an American television correspondent after her husband’s retirement. “But I was not a good one, to be honest. I was outraged by many things.”69
For the most part, Yeltsin’s concerns were more bread-and-butter than philosophical or historical. He was moved not by some metaphysical thirst for reform, democracy, or the market but by a visceral sense that the autocratic methodology of the Soviet order was losing effectiveness and rot was setting in little by little. “I began to feel,” he noted in Confession on an Assigned Theme, “that quite good and proper decisions… were turning out more often not to be implemented…. It was obvious that the system was beginning to malfunction.”70 This would have been more obvious when the book came out in 1990, but the harbingers were there in 1980—before Ronald Reagan entered the White House and escalated the arms race and before Mikhail Gorbachev started perestroika. Yeltsin caviled to friends that there was no limit to the time he sank into his work: The people around him shared a mystical belief in the power of ranking officials to fix problems by command. He begged off a get-together with UPI friends on the azure Lake Baikal in east Siberia because agricultural bureaucrats feared that without him there would be delays with the harvest. “They tell me,” he said acidly to a friend, “that after I speak [to farm workers] the cows give more milk and the milk is creamier.”71 Yeltsin, needless to say, saw the problem as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. As Oleg Lobov said, “He was thinking about how to utilize the capacities of the system that was. He expressed great dissatisfaction not with the system in general but on concrete issues.”72 The bacillus was there, gnawing away at Yeltsin before he left for Moscow in 1985. Asked in 1988 about his acceptance of an Order of Lenin in 1981, he said he valued that kind of recognition at the time, but, “The Brezhnev system was always a mental irritant, and I felt a sense of inner reproach.”73 The next year, while a deputy in the Soviet parliament, he was challenged to explain how his opinions had changed in a reformist direction. They had, he stated, “gradually transformed” over the past six to eight years—a gestation starting in the early 1980s in Sverdlovsk.74
In this connection, Yeltsin was in step with parts of his constituency. A critical spirit was afoot in the middle Urals. Sverdlovsk had larger communities of academics, researchers, students, and artists than any city in Soviet Russia except Moscow and Leningrad. Despite Yeltsin’s imperiousness toward Luk’yanin and the censoriousness of the obkom culture department, the authorities purposely overlooked unregistered amateur (samodeyatel’nyye) organizations dedicated to reading poetry and discussing movies. The Sverdlovsk Komsomol committee not only tolerated mass songfests and bohemian clubs for jazz, rock, and film but allocated rooms and equipment to them. Experimental discussion circles were found in several Sverdlovsk universities and institutes. One, in the philosophy department of UPI, was organized by Gennadii Burbulis, who later would be a high-level official in Yeltsin’s Russia. The youth housing complexes were wired for cable television, which was not subject to official censorship. In short, “In Sverdlovsk and Sverdlovsk oblast, changes in the atmosphere of public life began to take place before the advent of perestroika.”75 Yeltsin was mindful and did not fight them. He exhorted CPSU and Komsomol organizations to make their activities more relevant to impressionable young people by offering programs that matched their tastes and the values sainted in Soviet propaganda: “When there is a gap between word and deed… this has an especially baleful influence on our youth.”76