By 1980 Yeltsin also had a knack for appearing unannounced in factories, shops, and public transit. “Maybe it was partly for show, but he could on any day of the week sit down on a streetcar or bus, go around the route, and listen to what the passengers were saying, see for himself how well transportation was organized, how the city looked…. When he was at a workplace, he would think nothing of taking a cage down a mine shaft, or going over to a smelting furnace, talking with people, visiting the workers’ cafeteria.” In one eatery, he grabbed a spoon and asked a worker if he could taste his lunch; when he found it to be slop, he ordered an aide to ride herd on the place’s food service.90 Some visits took the form of raids on sites where Yeltsin thought there had been malfeasance. To these live forms was added television—“the blue screen,” as Russians call it—the electronic medium now piped into virtually every Soviet home.
A pair of events took the unmediated and mediated modes of contact to a higher plane: a question-and-answer session with college students in the Sverdlovsk Youth Palace on May 19, 1981, and a television broadcast to the region on December 18, 1982. There were several similar encounters before April 1985. The in-person and mass-media variants served several purposes at once. They relayed party policy, allowed the people to let off steam, hyped Yeltsin’s image, and gave him leverage vis-à-vis third parties.
Nothing was left to chance in the Youth Palace. A call for written questions for the first secretary went out six weeks beforehand. Nine hundred and thirty of them, deposited in receptacles at Sverdlovsk’s universities and institutes, were compiled and given to city and oblast administrators, who drafted answers. Obkom staff and then the first secretary pored over the draft responses. The 1,700 attendees received printed invitations, embossed with an effigy of Lenin, and were assigned seats in the banked hall. The meeting was five hours long. Yeltsin read out canned responses that were riffs upon the official line. But there were fresh ingredients that made the meeting an anomalous event for the Soviet Union of the day. With verve—in a verveless time—Yeltsin provided information about when this or that local improvement was going to be finished and promised to expedite overdue projects. He varied many of the prearranged responses ad lib and had the students pass 144 supplementary questions to the front of the hall. He let slip remarks about his disputatious nature. Asked why the Soviet Union was technologically inferior to the United States, he brashly gave as one of the reasons that “capitalist competition greatly stimulates labor efficiency, that is, only the strongest survive.” Most of all, he encouraged the students to speak their minds and communicated that he was on their side. They touched on everything from the paucity of tablecloths and schoolbooks to price gouging in the Shuvakish flea market and the losses of the Uralmash soccer club. They gave Yeltsin a standing ovation when he finished.91
The blue screen had transfixed Yeltsin since his early months as first secretary. In September 1978 he used it to urge city dwellers to help bring in the fall harvest, which was wasting away in the fields because of bucketing rains. Some 85,000 Sverdlovskers are said to have responded to his plea to enlist in “the battle for grain.”92 If this was Soviet mobilizational propaganda with a human touch, the television programs of the early 1980s, which were the brainchild of Igor Brodskii, the director of the Sverdlovsk television studio, had a different slant. They were organized around letters, which gave scope for startlingly frank appraisals. Some older apparatchiks who feared television had to be placated. They need not have worried, for the broadcasts could be minutely planned and prerecorded. The bevy of officials assigned to the December 1982 event spelled out in exquisite detail the camera angles, the topics to be discussed (in thirteen categories), and the towns and villages to be named (forty-five of them). But there was something new about the broadcast. Unlike anonymous agitprop, this was an acutely personalized dialogue. Brodskii’s “scenario plan”:
The video will be taped from the working office of B. N. Yeltsin.
Once the title of the broadcast has been flashed, the camera pans over envelopes spread out on the desk. We see that B. N. Yeltsin has been going through his mail. At this point, a crawler along the bottom of the screen reminds viewers about who is participating in the broadcast [First Secretary Yeltsin] and commenting on their letters.
The magnification changes from medium to high. In the picture is B. N. Yeltsin. He speaks directly to us:
“Good evening, comrades. The letters now on my desk are only part of the large amount of mail I will be commenting on….”93
In July 1984, when the obkom did a second big telecast, staff did alternate draft scenarios—every one of them devised to place Yeltsin in the limelight. In one, he would be shot watching film of interviews with 1982 letter writers. “Watching these interviews together with the television audience, B. N. Yeltsin could use them by way of illustration in the course of his conversation.” In another, he would stand on a factory floor and field questions from workers; the catch there was that the participants in the meeting might “upstage” Yeltsin. Then there was the scenario they adopted:
A monologue. The broadcast comes from the office of the first secretary of the obkom of the CPSU, comrade B. N. Yeltsin.
The kinks have been worked out of this form. It allows us to show comrade B. N. Yeltsin as a party and state figure in his usual working surroundings.
The reactions received by [Sverdlovsk] TV after the December [1982] broadcast show that people watched with great interest and listened intently to the direct appeal to them on the part of B. N. Yeltsin. The meeting was a 100 percent success.94
On television, the first secretary was more argumentative than at the in-person meetings. The programs were notable for the passel of gripes vented, now taking in insufficiencies of a catalogue of everyday articles (matches, dry cell batteries, bed linen, tea kettles, caramels), bribe taking, inflation, miserly pensions, pollution, and sore points of every description. Replying to questions about the unauthorized use of limousines and about bureaucrats who constructed houses with misappropriated materials, Yeltsin cautiously brought up the issue of the privileges of officialdom. The follow-up was a set of unobtrusive countermeasures to curb the use of official cars for driving children to school and wives to shop; family members of the leaders of the oblast party committee and government were now taken to their dachas in a minivan.95 In Moscow several years later, the response was to be more up-front.
Yeltsin admitted that he might be inciting unrealistic hopes. He had received, he said in December 1982, a squall of letters from Sverdlovskers begging him to advance them in the waiting line for government-built apartments. This was impossible, since the function had to be done by the book. He would check the correspondence and right any wrongs done. Other than that, he counseled honesty about the problem and forbearance until the housing supply could be increased: “I am not a magician. Neither are the central organs of government magicians…. It is hard to take when your request is refused, but I believe that the bitter truth is better than the sweet lie.”96 That aphorism was to take Yeltsin a long way.