[I have been asked] what privileges of officials of the Moscow city committee of the party we have abolished…. The question is incorrectly put. Why only abolish? We have added certain things—we have increased the amount of work and the number of bureau sessions, for instance. Gorkom officials no longer work from 9:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. but until 10:00 or 11:00 P.M. and sometimes until midnight. So far as abolition is concerned, for a start we have closed the [gorkom’s] commissary for manufactured goods. I think this is very useful. Gorkom workers will have a better feeling for our problems….
I get letters like this, for example: “Khrushchev long ago tried to dress us in [inmates’] padded jackets. Nothing came of it, and nothing will come of you. We have been stealing and we will go on stealing.” Comrades, we can break up this cycle only through common efforts….
I am being reminded that in three years I will have to give an account and answer for the promises I have made. I am ready for this and intend to devote these years entirely to the struggle.
And here I see a note of this sort: “Your plans are Napoleonesque. You are in over your head…. Go back to Sverdlovsk while you can.” (Cries of “Shame” from the audience.) Stay calm, comrades, I think the question did not come from this audience and that a note I received earlier has gotten mixed in. Looks like it was written by someone sick….
Some people are concerned about how long I will have the strength to work on so killing a schedule. I can reassure the comrades my health is fine, I have nothing to snivel about. If it gives out, I will grab several extra hours of rest. Meanwhile, we need to work full bore, otherwise we will not turn things around.
And then another note: “We hope that a year from now you will, in the Bolshevik way, tell us what you have not managed to get done.” Sure, agreed, one year from now I will tell you.78
What Yeltsin was presenting was the complex that Erik Erikson labels personal and occupational “overobedience.” Erikson’s thumbnail description of the overobedient Martin Luther is evocative of Yeltsin at this crossroads—“a certain zest in the production of problems, a rebellious mocking in dramatic helplessness, and a curious honesty (and honest curiosity) in the insistence on getting to the point, the fatal point, the true point.”79 Overobedience, as the Luther of Wittenberg shows, can be the antechamber to mutiny if the excitable concentration on means coincides with the setting in of incertitude about ends. And that is how it was with Yeltsin in Moscow.
CHAPTER SIX
The Mutineer
He was never at ease on the Soviet Olympus. The starchy protocol grated on Yeltsin. Unlike in Sverdlovsk, his coworkers’ homes were not close by, and they rarely socialized or played games together. “It was almost impossible,” to quote from the autobiographical Confession on an Assigned Theme, “to meet with or contact anyone,” such was the security bubble. “If you went out in public to the movies, the theater, or a museum, a whole advance guard would be sent. First they would check out and encircle the place, and only then could you make your appearance.”1
If his memoirs are any guide, Yeltsin was unsure what to make of the accoutrements provided him. His housing was middling and noisy, he said, and he implied that it was discrimination when he was not given quarters in the leafy neighborhood of Kuntsevo, in Moscow’s west end. Yet the “yellow brick building” on Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street in which the Yeltsins were accommodated—to Muscovites, the bricks and their hue bespoke a nomenklatura dwelling—was no hovel, and the family had as many square feet as on Working Youth Embankment in Sverdlovsk. As Yeltsin did not then understand, most apparatchiks assigned to Kuntsevo were lower in station than he and did not qualify for dachas. Yeltsin was supplied with one gratis in April 1985, a cottage shared with Anatolii Luk’yanov, the party department head who had just vetted him for the transfer to Moscow. If he at first thought his living conditions were too modest, they soon seemed Lucullan. Once in the Secretariat in July, he took Moskva-reka-5, the “state dacha” at the village of Usovo that had been occupied for several years by Gorbachev. He was “dismayed” at its ostentation. Set behind a stone wall, it was several times larger than Dacha No. 1 at Baltym, floored in marble, luxuriously furnished, and surrounded by a garden and playing courts. Yeltsin also professes to have been troubled by the dacha staff—three cooks, three waitresses, a chambermaid, and a groundskeeper, all of them on the roster of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate—who were his as soon as he was raised to the status of candidate member of the Politburo.2
Introduction to the innermost circle of power nudged Boris Yeltsin to think more globally about the regime’s raison d’être and its stance toward society. Naina Yeltsina was to use an intriguing culinary metaphor to explain how improbable mutiny would have been if her husband had not decamped from the Urals and gained the metropolitan perspective. “Chances are, if he had not come to Moscow he would not have carried out that act [his speech to the October 1987 plenum of the Central Committee]. That is because you learn more about the layer cake of life in Moscow than on the periphery. Out there, life is simpler. There is no layer cake there, by job and by level of life. There, although he had his high post, I don’t think we lived all that much better than other people.”3 Like many ex-provincials adjusting to the capital, he began the process a tad starry-eyed about those who had admitted him to the club. Some recruits over the years had set about conforming to it and finding a way to benefit. For Yeltsin, though, as Vitalii Tret’yakov puts it, naïveté curdled into aggressiveness. “At first it was a positive, constructive aggressiveness, the wish to do what it seemed to him Gorbachev expected, and to do it better and faster than the others…. But when it came to light that the general secretary did not view Yeltsin’s zeal and udarnichestvo [shockworkerness] with gratitude… [Yeltsin] took a turn toward an aggressiveness that was destructive of the power of the leader of perestroika.”4
Most of all, then, it was the fraying of his bond with Mikhail Gorbachev that disaffected Yeltsin. In his early months as Moscow chief, they spoke regularly. This tapered off over the course of 1986. A nitpicking point was the place of the Soviet first lady, Raisa Gorbacheva. Yeltsin felt she put on airs, and he was convinced that her husband told her more than was appropriate about political issues (often on long walks upon Gorbachev’s return from the Kremlin) and that she had more say on them from behind the curtains than was appropriate. In the summer of 1987, she hatched a project to convert the gigantic GUM department store on Red Square into an art museum. Yeltsin and Mayor Saikin were aghast and intervened with central planners to kill the idea.5 In one of his interviews with me, Yeltsin said he did not refer to Raisa in his letter or his October disquisition to the Central Committee (see below), but he had talked about her with Gorbachev face to face.6 Others confirmed this and said Gorbachev was furious that the question was raised in any form.7 When the U.S. ambassador asked Yeltsin in 1989 if he would bring Naina Yeltsina with him on his forthcoming visit to the United States, he said, “No. Absolutely not! I’ll not have her acting like Raisa Maximovna.”8 Yeltsin’s grousing about Mrs. Gorbachev was not only about her personally; it also indicates a certain sexism, one that was and is shared by many Russians.