Yeltsin was crestfallen when it sank in that he was to be a department head, a subaltern. He arrived untypically late at the Sverdlovsk House of Soviets for the Monday planning session of the obkom bureau on April 8. He had been detained by a red-eye flight from Moscow, where he got the details and the most fugitive of audiences with Gorbachev.23 He had an aide fetch a pencil and cracked it in three, as was his habit when peeved. He squinted at the group. “Yeltsin said, ‘Do you know who is sitting there [in Moscow]? They are doddering half-wits [staryye nedoumki]…. We have to chase them away.’ We all froze and blanched…. We could see what it was about: the first secretary of such an oblast was being given the position of head of a department…. He said it right out.”24 Everyone in those chairs understood that his contempt encompassed not only the geriatric Brezhnevites but Gorbachev, Ligachëv, and the arriviste group. All it would have taken to derail his career was one telephone call to Moscow from the local KGB chairman, Yurii Kornilov—the person Yakov Ryabov thought tattled on him in 1979—or any other person on the bureau. That none was made is testament to Yeltsin’s hold on the grandees of Sverdlovsk.
This tempest in a teapot rings true in context. In the estimation of Yeltsin, the supreme leaders had been exposed as poor judges of talent and tepid agents of change. He left for Moscow with a two-ton chip on his shoulder.
On Friday, April 12, 1985, Yeltsin reported for work at the Central Committee enclosure on Old Square, down the block from the Spasskii Gate of the Kremlin. The party center’s construction department had ten sections and about a hundred staff, a comedown from twice that many in the Sverdlovsk obkom. Yeltsin’s attention as head went to a housecleaning of personnel and to flagging projects to lay pipelines and build housing for workers in the west Siberian oil patch. Gorbachev was content. The pickings in the CPSU apparatus were slim: “We were looking everywhere to ‘spy out’ people who were active, unhesitating, and responsive to new things. Not too many of them were nearby, in the upper stratum. Yeltsin impressed me.”25
Boris and Naina were issued a nomenklatura apartment at 54 Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street, in a congested quarter of the downtown near the Belorussia Station. Its windows looked out at Transformation of the Savior, a long-closed Old Believers monastery. There the Yeltsins opened their doors to Tatyana, grandson Boris, and Tatyana’s second husband, Leonid Dyachenko. Since graduating from the university, Tatyana had been working at Salyut, a closed military institute where her job was to track space vehicles in orbit. Yelena and her family lived with the rest for a year or two and then went to party-supplied housing a short distance away.26
Before three months had lapsed, Gorbachev was happy enough with Yeltsin’s labors to put him up for the title Yeltsin had coveted in Apriclass="underline" secretary of the Central Committee for construction and capital investment. Questions came up at the Politburo on June 29 from Nikolai Tikhonov, Brezhnev’s comrade from pre–World War II Ukraine whom he had made prime minister of the Soviet Union in 1980. The octogenarian Tikhonov, born one year before Yeltsin’s father, demanded to know his qualifications for a secretaryship. Gorbachev rattled off the Yeltsin résumé and emphasized his energy, experience, and inside-out knowledge of the construction industry. “Somehow,” sniffed Tikhonov, “I don’t have a feel for him.” Ligachëv rushed to Yeltsin’s aid, explaining that he had gotten off to a fast start in Moscow and had been doing the rounds of the ministries, where “people have reached out to him.” Vladimir Dolgikh, the Central Committee secretary for the whole heavy-industrial sector and Yeltsin’s supervisor since April, said Yeltsin had shown he could work satisfactorily with central bureaucrats and regional party officials: “Having gotten to know him better, I have not noticed any weak spots.” Mikhail Solomentsev, the head of the party’s disciplinary arm, the Control Commission of the Central Committee, added a flaccid endorsement: “Comrade Yeltsin… is going to grow. He has all the right attributes: a good education and tempering as a civil engineer. This is a person with a future.” Another elderly member, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, expressed support. Tikhonov pulled in his horns and the Politburo consented to the designation, which was approved by Central Committee plenum on July 1, 1985.27
Yeltsin took the secretaryship as his due. Still running the construction department, he was relieved that he no longer communicated with the administrative and political summit through a go-between, which had been for him “a severe trial.” All spring he had fidgeted at meetings of department heads where he was meant to write down every pearl Dolgikh dropped. Other than a tour of the oil boomtowns of Tyumen province with Gorbachev in September 1985 and the odd meeting, his only communication with number one was by the Kremlin’s high-frequency telephone line.28
It was the third promotion that lofted Yeltsin into the political stratosphere. On Tuesday, December 24, 1985, the Moscow gorkom (city committee) of the CPSU, the relative of the Sverdlovsk obkom, installed him as its first secretary. Gorbachev, who moved the resolution on behalf of the Politburo, had been weighing the move since July, when he had Yeltsin promoted to Central Committee secretary: “I was ‘trying him out for size’ for Moscow.”29
In Confession, Yeltsin writes that the first he heard about the Moscow opening was at the Politburo meeting that discussed it and that he was reluctant to take it, offered the names of alternative candidates, and agreed only out of regard for party discipline. Gorbachev, Yeltsin recounts, said he wanted him to take the job. “For me, this was a bolt from the blue. I stood up and spoke out about the inappropriateness of such a decision.” He was a builder, an unassuming construction engineer, and would contribute more as a Central Committee secretary. “And also I did not know cadres so well in Moscow, so it would be difficult for me to work in the position.” But, Yeltsin says chastely, Gorbachev pressed the case. “The conversation in the Politburo was not simple… for me. Again [as in April], they said to me that party discipline applied and they knew better where I would be of most use to the party. In general, once again puzzling over it, understanding full well that the Moscow party organization could not be left in such a state, and throwing out suggestions as I went about whom it would be better to send there, I agreed.”30