Still captive to the communist paradigm, Yeltsin was declaring that the performance of the regime left something to be desired and he was simultaneously putting himself forward as the agent of change. This was the jumping-off point for role aggrandizement in the future.
Not everyone was taken by an approach that threw other local leaders into shadow. Gennadii Bogomyakov, the CPSU first secretary in Tyumen, the adjacent, oil-rich oblast in west Siberia, carped to party officials that Yeltsin was pandering and acting like a clown, not a proper Soviet solon.97 Ryabov was to write in hindsight that Yeltsin had begun “to play a phony game,” although he had to concede that his antics hoodwinked “simple people.” “‘Look what sort of leader we have,’ they said.”98 No alarm bells jangled where it counted—in the inner sanctum of the party in Moscow. Pavel Simonov in the Central Committee apparatus had admonished Yeltsin soon after his appointment to keep his photograph off the front page of Ural’skii rabochii.99 No one seemed unhappy with his playing to the crowd or at seeing his face splashed on the television screen hour after hour. Either official awareness was lagging or, more likely, there was an opinion at the center that the party would be better off if all local leaders were as popular as its man in Sverdlovsk.
Boris Yeltsin’s flight to prominence in a communist framework was by dint of his intelligence, drive, ability to communicate and call attention to himself, and “iron grip.” And it owed much to an instinct for timely decisions. The portrait in Confession of his log hopping on the Zyryanka River as a teenager may serve as an allegory for how he made his way in an uncharitable environment. “If you figured everything just right” and had “incredible dexterity,” he says, “you had a chance to cross over to the far bank.” Leap soon or late, or misconstrue another boy’s motion, and you would plop into the water, gasping for air, and have to clamber onto a new log to resume your quest, “not sure if you would save yourself.”100 In the work world, Yeltsin chose well when to spring and when to stand pat. If not—if, say, he had been unadventurous about trying out party work or had committed political hara-kiri by disobeying the Politburo on Ipat’ev House—he would occupy history’s footnotes and not its central narrative. Minus Yeltsin as a driving force, the narrative itself would be considerably different.
There were times when the self-interested actions of others, like Ryabov in pushing him for first secretary, propelled Yeltsin forward. Still other times, it was dumb luck and contingency. He might have come to a different end if Eduard Shevardnadze had not lured away Gennadii Kolbin in 1975, if Vyacheslav Bayev had taken the second secretaryship, if Moscow had listened to Leonid Ponomarëv in 1976, or if Dmitrii Ustinov or someone else had settled scores for his toying with General Ageyev, his witticisms with the workers, or his affiliation with the fallen Ryabov. If his patrons had known ex ante what they were to know ex post, it would have ended poorly for him. Ryabov, for one, believes the Yeltsin of the 1990s to be a turncoat, and says it all started in Sverdlovsk. These are the pangs of a Victor Frankenstein beholding his monster. Ryabov is not the only old-school communist who feels them today.
The sachem of Sverdlovsk no longer needed to be a survivalist; his testing was routinized; his rebellious urges were in abeyance. The primary script in his mature life was success—being first—constrained by duty to the vertical structures hegemonic in Soviet society. Although the regime was dictatorial, agents could implement its will only if they could recruit and promote on merit and if they were given some leeway and some space to advocate for themselves and their organizations. Yeltsin was an effective regional prefect, a hard-boiled boss with a difference, because he used to his advantage the liberties granted. Doing so made him less convinced than when he started of the soundness and perfectability of the system. Serious policy questions could only be settled in a “supercentralized” fashion, he was to recall. But the center’s attention span was short and its strategic sense vitiated by aged leaders and the opaqueness of decision making. Get away from its priorities, and the problems were yours to handle: “All you could place your trust in was yourself and the oblast…. The center did little to help…. We decided the other questions by ourselves, self-reliantly [samostoyatel’no].”101 What was more, the reflexive “self” was becoming an elastic category for comrade B. N. Yeltsin. Populism and a nonethnic Russianism were working their way into his thinking. And he was beginning to realize there were means—politically rewarding means—to deal in the populace on the conversation about government and change. That realization would bring about an activism that was not compliant.
CHAPTER FIVE
Megalopolis
Boris Yeltsin was not going to count in the main game of Soviet politics unless he relocated from the fringes of the system to the metropole. Did he want to? He denies it in his memoirs: “I never had the dream or so much as the wish to work in Moscow.” He had received a series of proposals to resettle there, “some of them” as minister in the central government, and turned them all down. A son of Sverdlovsk and the Urals, he wanted to stay with his friends and colleagues and loathed how Muscovites created prettified façades, Potemkin villages, and looked down their noses at country cousins.1 His Sverdlovsk patron, Yakov Ryabov, spins it differently. Sverdlovskers frequently moved to Moscow and to other regions, and thought it “a normal part of the selection and assignment of cadres.” Yeltsin studied with interest several offers in the provinces and the capital before he was lifted to obkom secretary in 1975, and used them to importune Ryabov to advance his career locally.2 He also, Ryabov claims, felt envious of some of the promotions given to others—for example, Nikolai Ryzhkov, the director of Uralmash, who moved to a high ministerial position in 1975.3 Information is lacking on the jobs Yeltsin may have turned down after 1975. If he did so, it was not out of a refusal to leave Sverdlovsk.
As a reputable regional administrator, Yeltsin was a surefire candidate for inclusion in any effort to revivify the Soviet leadership. Generational kinetics bolstered the case for him. In November 1976 only three of seventy-two first secretaries in RSFSR regions were younger than he, and he was ten years younger than the average fifty-five-year-old provincial leader. By January 1985 he was at the median in seniority—thirty-six officials had been chosen earlier than he and thirty-five later—but still five years more youthful than the average first secretary, whose age was now up to fifty-nine.4 In that way, he offered an attractive combination of combat-hardened experience and energy.
Yeltsin’s rise out of Sverdlovsk came in three steps in 1985. All were questioned by Muscovites with political clout. Personalities and niggling jealousies, not grand visions of reform, were behind it. There were to be consequences, however.
The change to change in the USSR started in the abbreviated Kremlin reign of Yurii Andropov, the onetime KGB chairman who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 and died of kidney failure in February 1984. Andropov sounded the alarm about the regime’s problems and tried to inculcate “order and discipline” in the bureaucracy and the workforce. His disciplinarian line was in those days very much to the liking of Yeltsin, who was to voice “the highest and the best opinion” of him.5 One may conjecture also that Yeltsin’s grizzled supporter in the Politburo, Andrei Kirilenko, expounded his qualities to Andropov before Kirilenko’s retirement in late 1982.