Yeltsinesque populism, a nascent motif in Sverdlovsk, found its way onto the front burner in Moscow. While he continued with impromptu gifts of wristwatches—bodyguard Korzhakov had to keep a spare in his overcoat pocket—the focus shifted to rides on public transit and visitations to trouble spots. The rides were well-rehearsed trips of two or three stops on a subway car, bus, or tramcar. On a fixed destination such as a retail store, workers’ or students’ dining hall, or apartment house basement, Yeltsin would swoop down in his limousine; he bantered with the crowd; if corruption or skullduggery was uncovered, the wrongdoers were chewed out and in the direst cases fired. Managers of food stores on main boulevards learned to keep an attractive assortment of produce in their glass cases. Tipped off to that, Yeltsin had his guards look for places to be audited off the beaten track, which required the KGB to allot extra conveyances to steer the first secretary through the traffic.55 As the columnist Vitalii Tret’yakov was to write as an early champion of Yeltsin in 1989, these field trips were in the manner of Haroun al-Rashid, the caliph from Arabian Nights who roamed Baghdad in the dress of a commoner, spreading assurance that he knew what to do about the people’s problems.56
In the Moscow media, Mikhail Poltoranin, the new Moskovskaya pravda editor-in-chief who was moved at Yeltsin’s behest from Pravda, printed titillating, dirt-digging exposés of the illicit benefits of the nomenklatura—of the spouses of party secretaries being chauffeured to stores, of nepotism in august universities and institutes, and of fat-cat buffets, order desks, dachas, and clinics. In his question-and-answer meeting with the agitprop staff in April 1986, Yeltsin related how he had removed a raion second secretary, I. V. Danilov, for illegally converting his apartment into “a palace” with a fireplace that blew smoke into his neighbors’ flats. Officers of the city party committee had out of their own free will waived their limos and chauffeurs. “See,” Yeltsin deadpanned, “the [six] gorkom secretaries are smiling. Today they came here together in one car.”57 That July Yeltsin initiated the ouster of Nikolai Lebedev, the rector of the Moscow State Institute for International Relations, the undergraduate training school for the Soviet diplomatic service. Lebedev’s offense had been to show preference in admissions to the children of nomenklatura officials.
In the age of glasnost, the homespun and pungent locutions of Yeltsin made him the darling of journalists. An interview with him guaranteed splashy copy and a cruise along the frontier of permissible speech. During his first year in the Moscow hot seat, Yeltsin the gadfly and moralist concentrated on the capital city; in year two, he generalized from its experience and went farther afield. Vladimir Mezentsev, a correspondent for Ostankino, the primary Soviet television studio, collared him at a youth league meeting at ZIL in April 1987. Yeltsin expostulated for the camera that the time had come for young workers to be “unfettered” and granted “creative freedom” to dance or listen to music as they liked. He castigated the Komsomol for being “covered in bureaucratic moss and cobwebs” and for hackneyed methods, like organizing forty-six overtime shifts before the branch’s forty-sixth conference. Mezentsev was agog: “He was saying words no one was then saying about the canonized Komsomol and by extension about the party. He was saying what they didn’t let me say at Ostankino. He was speaking for all of us who wept at the hypocrisies of the communist way of life.”58 As sympathetic Muscovites saw it, he was taking the discussion of the nomenklatura and its incompetence out of their kitchens and onto the streets of the novostroiki, the tracts of cookie-cutter, high-rise housing where most of them lived and raised their children. Yeltsin further pushed the envelope by meeting with foreign newspapermen. In May 1987 he gave his first interview on non-Soviet television. He was filmed in action and then in a long conversation in his office with Diane Sawyer of CBS News, for the news special “The Soviet Union—Seven Days in May.” He was won over to scheduling it by seeing a photograph of the winsome Sawyer.59
Yeltsin’s policies in 1985–87 were not always iconoclastic. He cautioned that cultural activity had to observe some limits of propriety. Despite the abuse of his family in the Stalin years, he was against “throwing stones into the garden of the past,” though he was for unfreezing debate and calmly reassessing errors and crimes.60 He continued for some time to tout remedies within the old paradigm over ones that might disturb it. In July 1986, with him in the chair, the party caucus in the Moscow Soviet, the city’s municipal council, gave the newly chosen chief of its trade directorate, Nikolai Zav’yalov, fourteen days to make a “turnaround” in the supply of vegetables; when he did not achieve the impossible, he was sent packing.61 At a symposium on mass transit in 1987—to which, as a good showman, he rode a trolley bus—Yeltsin charted a plan to mark off the city into sectors and lay down hard passenger quotas in them all. The dean of economics at Moscow State University, Gavriil Popov, retorted that this evaded the core problem: In a planned economy, there was no housing market that would let Muscovites lessen their daily commutes by moving closer to work; the only way to fix the problem was to create a market. Yeltsin harrumphed and had Popov—who several years later would be an important supporter of his—struck from the guest list for future meetings.62 Asked at his consultation with the propagandists whether restraints on migration into Moscow would spawn a labor shortage, Yeltsin shot back, “We need not to bring in new people but to force Muscovites to work” through a police dragnet to roust out “spongers.” He defended the decree shuttering some research institutes as a wakeup call to laggards: “Closing down the first ten or fifteen… will have quite an effect in activating the others.”63
Two years after losing the Moscow post, Yeltsin was to explain his hamhanded techniques as determined by education, situational needs, and necessity:
In Moscow, there was no alternative. This is a bewildering city, I had a difficult legacy to deal with. And you have to take into account that all of us who today are over fifty grew up in the time of administrative-command methods. You can’t get away from this. Thus far we have no other methods. We educate ourselves and try to find something different, but it all goes very slowly. When I worked in the gorkom, 90 percent of the problems that arose had to be dealt with immediately and decisively. The situation demanded it.64