Some years later, Vitalii Tret’yakov, by then a critic of Yeltsin’s, was to deprecate the latter’s experience as Moscow boss as the flailing of a gung-ho but dim-witted Soviet udarnik—the “shock worker” or Stakhanovite of Stalinist mythology.65 There was something of the norm-busting shock worker to the Yeltsin of 1985–87, but to pigeonhole him as that is to lose sight of the tactility that was opening him up to new viewpoints and to flushing out new allies of change. Even in Sverdlovsk, he had leavened command methods with understanding of the Soviet economy’s residual private sector. As inhospitable as ever to blatantly illegal activities, such as the sale of scarce goods under the counter at inflated prices, Yeltsin in Moscow referred with increased respect to what nonstate producers and distributors could bring to the table. At the 1986 meeting with propaganda workers, he sympathized with the charge that prices in the farmers’ bazaars were sky-high, yet went on to make different points:
I have been to many Moscow bazaars. I have never seen such prices…. A pathetic sprig of parsley costs fifty kopeks or maybe a ruble. A kilogram of meat goes for eight rubles. [Note: The average monthly salary in the USSR in 1985 was 190 rubles.] But we mustn’t put a ceiling on prices, since this method has been tried before and gave no results. The vendors will just move on to other cities and provinces. The way to apply pressure on the marketplace is through trade. What we need to do is build a cooperative store at every bazaar. It doesn’t matter if sausage is sold in those stores for eight rubles. I have a list of people who can pay a high price. At the very least, they will be purchasing sausage that actually smells like meat.66
If the only case Yeltsin made for free commerce in the Urals had been that it would keep food prices down, he now hinted that it might meet demand from comparatively well-off consumers, boost supply, and improve quality.
The same explorative mood came through on political topics. Most Soviet officials held their noses and tolerated the liberalizing measures the party espoused under the rubric of demokratizatsiya, democratization, at the Central Committee plenum of January 27–28, 1987; to Yeltsin, they were yeast for reform. In September 1987 he was at his seat in the Moscow Soviet when a young deputy named Arkadii Murashov, a physicist by profession, stood up to announce that he was planning to do something never before done in Soviet legislatures for the past sixty years: He was breaking unanimity to vote against a resolution sponsored by the executive. Yeltsin balled the chamber over by defending Murashov’s freedom to differ and calling for the draft motion to be referred back to committee.67 Another example would be his warming to environmental and urban-conservation issues. Hearing voices from below, Yeltsin halted construction of an eyesore World War II memorial on Poklonnaya Hill, evicted about thirty unhealthful factories from Moscow, and had a batch of pre-Soviet street names restored and pre-Revolution mansions saved from the wrecking ball. Ecopolitics brought him into contact with the neformaly (informals), the extra-governmental organizations that sprouted as curbs on grassroots activity slackened. The Moscow informals advocated a variety of causes, everything from free speech to arms control and animal rights, but not every group was progressive or liberal. On May 6, 1987, Yeltsin and Mayor Saikin met with a delegation from Pamyat, an ultranationalist, anti-Semitic organization illegally created in the 1970s. Five hundred Pamyat activists had been waving placards on Manezh Square, in Moscow’s first wildcat demonstration since the 1920s. In August, representatives of fifty Soviet informals, most of them liberal in orientation, gathered in a Moscow hall under the protection of the gorkom.68
The city of Moscow was a far tougher nut than Sverdlovsk for Yeltsin to crack as leader. Its economy was less militarized, its intellectual and expert classes were more influential, and it was home to the bloated central bureaucracy. At a time of ferment, it was being tugged to and fro. That is, it was both a hotbed of reformism and a stronghold for the old ways. Yeltsin’s problem was the latter and what, in an unpublished speech to the Central Committee, he decried as the snobbery of “pampered people who think they are bigwigs.”69 With rare empathy, Gorbachev said afterward, in the mid-1990s, that he understood “it was not easy to work in Moscow and Yeltsin very likely felt more acutely than others the resistance of the party and economic nomenklatura to perestroika…. Yeltsin happened upon obstacles that in Sverdlovsk he did not suspect existed.”70
To light his path through the Moscow labyrinth, the new maestro had neither the local knowledge nor the cohesive team he had in the Urals. The Sverdlovsk factotums in tow to Yeltsin were few; many of the Muscovites with whom he worked saw him as a hick. As in Sverdlovsk, he strategized Monday mornings with a kitchen cabinet, which by the end of 1986 included Valerii Saikin, Mikhail Poltoranin, his second secretary (the Sverdlovsker Yurii Belyakov) and secretary for ideological questions (Yurii Karabasov), and the head of the Moscow KGB (Nikolai Chelnokov). The official bureau of the gorkom congregated on Wednesdays. To keep it on its toes, Yeltsin again resorted to criticism and self-criticism, with the difference that he now shared his associates’ inadequacies with the press. The shared recreation that pumped up élan in Sverdlovsk would have been out of place in Moscow. Spinal and foot problems kept Yeltsin from playing volleyball after May 1986, when he scrimmaged at a Georgian vacation spot.71 His dacha was far from the cottages of gorkom staffers. There was no hunting range at which he could dish out quotas for fowl and game.
Yeltsin’s sense of responsibility to the regime and to the project of reforming communism spurred him on. And he craved personal success as ardently as he ever had, seeing no inconsistency between it and the reform cause. The Moscow assignment also elicited the testing script, as we have called it. As never before in his political work, Yeltsin after December 1985 felt the compulsion to show strength and proficiency. He recalls in Notes of a President how he “began to breathe in an utterly different way,” energized by the demands his new post made on him.72 In Confession on an Assigned Theme, he lays it on thick in describing the close of his workday. Arriving home, rarely before midnight, he would sit five or ten minutes in the limousine: “I was so worn out that I did not have the strength to raise my arm.”73 His sleep budget, he declared to underlings, was four hours a night; he was up at the crack of dawn to exercise, read, and prepare for work. (Aleksandr Korzhakov confirms the schedule.)74 Yeltsin, Korzhakov states, put great effort into memorizing names, facts, and figures: “Yeltsin came from the wilds and felt the need when he got the chance to underscore that there are people there who are as good as Muscovites.”75 Symptomatic of the testing mode was the puffing up of the objects of his wrath into extra-large beings. Thus the district secretary drummed out for his apartment renovations was cast as comporting himself like “a prince”; others were preening “princelings” or “his majesty the worker of the apparatus.”76
Yeltsin drew a connection between his efforts on behalf of reform and the determination of opponents to scotch them and even to do him in. In the Q&A at the House of Political Enlightenment in 1986, he selected for off-the-cuff reply questions that highlighted the point,77 and hammered it home by quoting from an incendiary memorandum from another file: