A concrete problem that increasingly distressed was the top-heaviness of Soviet government. In late communist times, decisions responsive to local interests awaited years of special pleading with Moscow. Sverdlovsk planners first petitioned the center to approve a subway in 1963; a preliminary edict was issued in 1970; to get shovels in the ground in 1980, it took entreaties via Andrei Kirilenko and a Yeltsin pilgrimage to Brezhnev’s office, where Brezhnev asked him to handwrite a Politburo resolution; the first stations did not come into service until 1994.77 To get things done took pluckiness and ingenuity. The Serov highway was built on the fly over twenty years without any central largesse. Yeltsin badgered factory directors and district personnel for the materials, equipment, and labor. The first secretary, who was god and tsar on some scores, had to be a nagger and a supplicant on others. Through the obkom, he had at his disposal thousands of personnel; thousands more were out of his reach, among them all the holders of top positions in the military-industrial complex. The state industrialists in the factories could not be obliged to contribute, only persuaded. And when they did chip in, Moscow might suddenly reverse direction and take away local gains. In 1980 Yeltsin and Yurii Petrov inveigled twenty Sverdlovsk factories, mostly in the defense sector, to jointly manufacture for use in the oblast heavy-duty harrows, which are toothed steel tools for tilling, aerating, and weeding fields. They were beside themselves when mandarins in Gosplan appropriated the harrows and carted them off to farms in Ukraine, with the statement that Sverdlovsk land was fit only for pasturage. Yeltsin’s telephone calls to Gosplan, the minister of agriculture, and Mikhail Gorbachev, by then the Central Committee’s secretary for agrarian affairs, were in vain.78
These machinations brought Yeltsin up against a question pregnant for the future: the place of “Russia” in the Soviet federation. A reason Sverdlovsk fared so badly in the byplay with Moscow was that the regions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, RSFSR, lacked the mediating structures available to the non-Russian republics. The RSFSR had a toothless government and no CPSU machinery at all. In the party, provinces like Sverdlovsk reported to USSR-level officials; in places like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, there was a republic-level party committee, bureau, and first secretary. An inconsequential Bureau of the Central Committee for RSFSR Affairs had existed in 1936–37, under Stalin, and was resuscitated by Khrushchev in 1958, only to have Brezhnev terminate it in 1965. The Russians “were always the Soviet Union’s awkward nationality, too large either to ignore or to give the same institutional status as the Soviet Union’s other major nationalities.”79
What Yeltsin digested on the job in the Urals—again, well before his move to Moscow—was that Russia was an “accessory” or “appendage” of the imperial Soviet center, an unsung “donor” to the rest. “In Sverdlovsk I thought about this and began to talk about it… not loudly but, you would say, under my breath.”80 Naina Yeltsina and the engineering institute where she worked preferred contracts with clients in Kazakhstan, where she had lived as a girl, to work with RSFSR organizations: The Kazakhs, unlike the Russians, could make decisions expeditiously.81 At the beginning of the 1980s, Yeltsin and Petrov jotted down a tripartite scheme for change: decentralizing the USSR’s federal system; making Russia institutionally whole by strengthening its government and giving it a CPSU central committee or some such structure; and carving the RSFSR into seven or eight regional republics, one of them a Urals republic, strong enough to make a go of it. They kept the sketch to themselves. Petrov summarized it two decades afterward in that Urals nostrum samostoyatel’nost’, self-reliance. Smacking of autonomist ideas that have long swirled in the Urals, the scheme points toward the position Yeltsin was to take on Soviet federalism in 1990–91.82
The other area of probing that was a bellwether of the politics of perestroika dealt with relations between the leader and the mass of the population. Soviet partocrats rarely rubbed shoulders with ordinary people. When they did, it was at perfunctory affairs before docile viewers, pegged to state holidays or single-candidate elections, and more ritualized after about 1960 than before.83 As first secretary, Yeltsin did all in his power to spice up these rituals.
At the groundbreaking for the Sverdlovsk subway in August 1980, he invited Young Pioneers to attend, play the bugle and drum, and distribute flowers to the mud-splattered construction workers—and to the members of the obkom bureau, who lined up long-faced behind the first secretary.84 To mark the 1984 campaign for the USSR Supreme Soviet, Yeltsin organized a rail tour of remote districts of the oblast, in the dead of winter. The locomotive pulled two cars: a political coach full of obkom officials and an artistic coach containing twenty-two singers and musicians shanghaied for the journey from Sverdlovsk theaters:
Every day of the agitation outing, from February 20 to 25, 1984, through the soiled and almost uninhabitable towns of the north, followed the same program. In the morning, the travelers from the political coach went off to the next kolkhoz or sovkhoz, where Yeltsin would summon the peasants to keep their cattle stalls as spotless as their own homes. In the afternoon, he would give a report on political and economic themes to the local communists. But in the evenings, like balsam on the soul after wearisome speeches, reproval, and criticism from the first secretary, the long-awaited concert would begin…. [The performers] were surprised at Yeltsin’s abilities. As it happened, he not only knew by heart ditties from the operettas of Offenbach but reeled off the names of the workers at the enterprises that those on the agitation train had visited.85
In various appearances, Yeltsin departed by inches from the ceremonial. One way for which he had a fancy was spur-of-the moment gift giving. The gift of choice was a watch—remember the high value he and his Berezniki teammates placed on the watches they received as city volleyball champions—often unfastened from his own or an aide’s wrist. The first occasion of which I am aware occurred in 1977. Yeltsin had implored the director of the Nizhnii Tagil construction organization, Eduard Rossel, to help him win a “socialist competition” with the Severstal iron-and-steel plant in Cherepovets, Vologda province. Severstal had signed up to complete a large mill for making steel plate by December 25, six days before the end of the year. Yeltsin and Rossel assigned 25,000 workers in three shifts to the Nizhnii Tagil Metallurgical Works in order to commission their mill by a week before and qualify it as the largest industrial construction project to be finished in the year of the sixtieth jubilee of the Bolshevik Revolution. On December 18 the job was done, and Yeltsin spoke before a rally of the entire workforce. At the microphone, he took the gold watch off his left wrist and put it on Rossel’s. He told the crowd the day could have never have been won without them and Rossel, and explained that the watch had been given to him as a birthday present earlier that year by none other than General Secretary Brezhnev. The workers clapped madly.86
Yeltsin took to handing out watches and other keepsakes to rank-and-file employees. Naina Yeltsina gave him a wristwatch for many of his birthdays, only to find that the latest timepiece had disappeared a week or two later.87 The presents, and wry oratorical throwaways, were the public equal of the surprises he loved to spring on his wife at home. As an example of the latter, he concluded his report to a party conference at Uralkhimmash by opening up the floor. Employees hollered that housing was impossibly short. Not skipping a beat, Yeltsin redirected the plea to the USSR government minister responsible for the plant, seated beside him, with the dig that “surely you cannot refuse” it. The minister said meekly he would boost housing quotas for the factory, and did.88 Yeltsin’s replies to questions dripped with sarcasm about “those in Moscow who, so he said, understood little yet consumed much.”89