But Ryzhkov was not the only queasy one. Yevgenii Razumov, the deputy head of the Secretariat’s personnel department, had known Yeltsin since 1976, when he was the Politburo’s representative at the plenum of the Sverdlovsk obkom that confirmed Yeltsin as first secretary. He is said to have spoken out against all three of Yeltsin’s 1985 promotions.38 Anatolii Luk’yanov, the then head of the Central Committee’s general department, says that when Moscow for Yeltsin was under review, he received many letters from Sverdlovsk lambasting Yeltsin and saying “you will weep” if he were to be given a lofty position.39
One issue that did not harm Yeltsin’s chances was his physical condition. Ligachëv in early 1985 had Yevgenii Chazov, the chief of the Kremlin medical service, do a briefing on it, saying he had heard that it was poor (Dolgikh said the same to Chazov). Chazov gave him a clean bill of health.40 Alcohol would have been one of the subjects covered. Luk’yanov has noted that “in Russia nobody is ever hired or fired exclusively on the basis of his attitude toward alcohol,”41 but there were limits to this leniency. Ligachëv, Yeltsin’s protector in 1985, was a teetotaler and, with Solomentsev, conceived the “dry law” of May 1985, the short-lived attempt to curb drunkenness and alcoholism among the citizenry. Ligachëv said to friends in the 1990s that Yeltsin did not touch a drop on his trip to Sverdlovsk in 1984 and no excess was ever in evidence.42 Had Yeltsin been a problem drinker, there would have been no invitation to Moscow or its party committee.
The Moscow position was an opportune outlet for Yeltsin’s urban and regional expertise, hankering for recognition, and love of a good fight. As citadel of the Soviet regime, the city stood for all that was amiss with communism and for its potential for redemption through reform. For a month after December 24, Yeltsin galloped through its factories, architectural monuments, and housing projects. His slow-ripening disaffection was giving way to political wanderlust and an itch to speak “the bitter truth” instead of “the sweet lie,” as he had put it on Sverdlovsk television in 1982. He committed wholeheartedly to the reform project and was determined to make his mark on it, repressing any reservations he had about Gorbachev as an individual. As Aleksandr Korzhakov, a former attendant to Brezhnev and Andropov assigned to Yeltsin by the Ninth Directorate of the KGB as one of his three bodyguards, recollected, Yeltsin was “the sincerest member of the party” in cleaving to the general course of perestroika. He “tried harder than the other party bosses to change life for the better.”43
On January 24, 1986, Yeltsin surveyed Moscow’s woes in a stentorian two-hour report to its party conference, held in the glittering convention hall of the Soviet trade unions—the place where Soviet leaders from Lenin to Chernenko had lain in state and Stalin’s show trials were held in the 1930s. Yeltsin wove his points into a parable of broader import. Under Grishin and Brezhnev, the city had been “infected by window dressing, an overemphasis on successes, and a hushing up of shortcomings [through] cooking the books… [and] fakery.” So inveterate was the illness, he said, that even calls for improvement “have been to a great extent perceived formulaically… lamely, at times cravenly.” “There may be some who think these judgments sound indelicate,” Yeltsin added, but “they had to come out.”44 Grishin, still a member of the Politburo, sat with a poker face on the podium, within spitting distance of Yeltsin. He did not ask to speak in selfdefense : “This is how we were raised, not to contradict the opinion of the [leadership], which was where the assertions of the keynote speaker [Yeltsin] were coming from.”45 He never grasped that the Yeltsin and Gorbachev messages might be appreciably different. Grishin was to lose his advisory post in 1987 and died in 1992.
The words from the Moscow soapbox were the talk of the town. Yeltsin’s speech was a “strong fresh wind” for the party, Gorbachev told him. The general secretary, Yeltsin adds, said this “without an approving smile and with a blank look on his face.”46 “From that moment,” says Anatolii Chernyayev, the perspicacious foreign-policy aide to Gorbachev from 1985 to 1991, “dates [Yeltsin’s] glory.” He wrote in his diary that “in spirit, in vocabulary, and in approaches” the speech was putting forth “new norms of life and activity” for the regime. Chernyayev noticed lines at newsstands for that day’s Moskovskaya pravda, the Moscow newspaper that carried the text.47
Yeltsin on February 26, 1986, regaled the delegates to the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the whole CPSU. Orthodox in some ways, heterodox in others, his missionary speechifying broadened the discourse about Soviet reform by flogging “the infallibility of officialdom,” its “special blessings” (material privileges), and the smothering of innovation by an “inert stratum of time servers with party cards.” Yeltsin was the first spokesman at this level to propose some revision to political structures (“periodic accountability” of leaders from the general secretary on down) and to say that the regime’s very continuance depended on disinfecting changes taking hold. In his best line, he also gave the national audience a taste of the theatricality so well known in Sverdlovsk. Why had he not been as forthright at the last party congress in 1981? “I can answer and answer sincerely. I did not then have enough courage and political experience.”48 By inference, he now had both.
The priority in Moscow was a cadres shakeup. “Conservatism has gone way too far among us,” Yeltsin fumed before several thousand agitprop workers, officials who propagated the party line in the media and the education system, at the House of Political Enlightenment on April 11, 1986. “The city authorities have been playing make-believe [zanimalis’ pokazukhoi]: ‘We know what we are doing, everything is A-plus here, we are the tops in the world, there is no need to wash Moscow’s dirty laundry in public.’ Those who keep on thinking this way should vacate their places and clear out.”49 Many did. His first week as viceroy, Yeltsin gave Vladimir Promyslov, who had been mayor since Khrushchev’s day and was politically independent of Grishin, until noon the day after to leave. When Promyslov stalled for time, Yeltsin telephoned him and “suggested that he depart the easy way and not the hard way”; twenty minutes later, Promyslov had quit. To succeed him, Yeltsin tapped Valerii Saikin, the director of the ZIL Works, the biggest auto plant in the USSR; he had to talk Gorbachev out of appointing Saikin Soviet minister of the automobile industry.50 In twenty-two months, Yeltsin retired all of the Grishin-appointed secretaries of the gorkom, two-thirds of the raion first secretaries, and, with Saikin, about 90 percent of the leaders in the Promyslov municipal machine. The replacements, better trained technically and up to twenty-five years younger, were often plucked from nonstandard channels, particularly, as in Sverdlovsk, from the ranks of factory management. Yeltsin, an interloper in the capital, had to rely on locals for personnel advice, but he did not always take it: “Like a wild animal, he had a feel for any imprecision, for any falseness in tonality, and was always on his guard…. If he asked you whom to appoint to some post and you gave a name right away, before you knew it that person would be appointed. If you said you needed to think about it, he would set to thinking himself whether to make the appointment or not.”51
He was in almost as big a rush to tackle policy problems. Often it came down to what Yeltsin had tried out in Sverdlovsk, such as youth housing complexes, the City Day festival (the first in September 1987), and street fairs. On other issues, his preferred remedy was an action bundle linked to numbered targets and deadlines, to emphasize the urgency: twenty-six “multipurpose programs” for socioeconomic issues; letters to forty-two central agencies laying down the law on industrial automation and manufacture of consumer goods; thirty-nine superfluous research institutes and laboratories he wanted closed down forthwith; retrenchment in the residency permits issued to rural and small-town migrants (limitchiki, persons admitted on governmental “limits”) who were overloading the Moscow housing supply. Yeltsin pestered the Politburo and the Soviet cabinet for tons of meat, fish, and produce; on city hall, he foisted heavier burdens and tauter plans.52 There was some clucking at the highest level at his demands but nothing to indicate a deep split.53 When Saikin shared with the gorkom bureau a plan to expand the subway and, under a Politburo directive, provide every Moscow family with an apartment by the year 2000, Yeltsin whipped out his pen, drew a line through Saikin’s numbers, and superimposed more demanding ones: apartments for all by 1995 and a third more metro track than projected. Saikin could not believe his eyes.54 Objectives such as these would have been hard to attain under the best of circumstances. Most of them were to remain on paper as the Soviet and then Russian economy went into free fall, and not to be feasible until after Yeltsin’s retirement in 1999.