More apropos were the two leaders’ styles and policy positions. To Yeltsin, after their political honeymoon in 1985–86, Gorbachev was vacillating, long-winded, and conceited: “You could not talk of any democracy in the Politburo. After the general secretary’s preamble, everybody was supposed to get up and read out from a little card, ‘Hooray, I agree with everything.’”9 Yeltsin had little experience in a collegial decision-making organ he did not head. In Sverdlovsk he was a member of the obkom bureau for only eighteen months before becoming first secretary, and in the Moscow city committee he was in the chair from the start. For his part, Gorbachev thought Yeltsin was playing the prima donna, and in mid-1986 he instructed the editor-in-chief of Pravda, Viktor Afanas’ev, to mute coverage of him in the paper.10 Gorbachev also thought Yeltsin was overstrung and that he was running scared when his intense tactics in Moscow did not bring results. It was generally believed when Yeltsin was made capital-city boss, and it was his expectation, too, that he would be a full member of the CPSU Politburo, with voting rights, as Viktor Grishin had been from 1971 to 1986.11 He was hurt when Gorbachev refused to make it happen. Gorbachev was to concede in his memoirs that Yeltsin had reason to feel affronted, as there were still “mastodons and dinosaurs” from the Brezhnev era on the bureau.12 And there were those who passed Yeltsin by. Of the three individuals promoted to full member of the Politburo in June 1987, one had been a candidate member for the same amount of time as Yeltsin, the second had spent less time than he as a candidate, and the third overleaped the candidate stage altogether. Ligachëv, whom Yeltsin more and more saw as a mastodon, has maintained that Yeltsin at some point in 1987 expressed anger directly to the voting members of the Politburo that the Grishin precedent had not been applied. Yeltsin retired from the room, and Ligachëv said he was categorically against such a promotion and would resign if Gorbachev made it. Gorbachev did not make it.13
On the nitty-gritty of within-system reform and its prospects, the perceptions of Yeltsin and Gorbachev came to vary. In retrospect, Yeltsin made it sound like a neat breach, where he questioned Gorbachev’s scheme for turning the country and the regime around and Gorbachev stayed with the tried and true: “Despite what seemed to be changes for the better, despite the upsurge of emotion that was roiling the whole country, I sensed that we were running up against a brick wall. The thing was, this time we could not get away with pretty new phrases about perestroika and renewal. We needed concrete actions, new steps forward, but Gorbachev did not want to take such steps.”14 At the time, the break was messier and more tentative than this passage implies, and more discomfiting to those on the ground. Yeltsin was to tell the Politburo in October 1987 that he first grew disconcerted in the summer of 1986. However, there were few public or semipublic clues of it until 1987, and it took most of 1987 for his mood to work itself out.
The bad blood between Yeltsin and Gorbachev showed in the weekly meetings of the Politburo in the autumn of 1986. It was unmistakable there, though not yet on the outside, when the Politburo sat on January 19, 1987, to deliberate Gorbachev’s report to the Central Committee plenum on political change, just around the corner.15 Yeltsin heard out Gorbachev on the draft report and then recited a litany of twenty suggestions for improvement. Several were bellicosely worded. The manuscript, he said, oversold the accomplishments of reform, and bureaucratic foot-dragging made it unwise “to succumb to optimism.” Comparisons of perestroika with the 1917 revolution, such as Gorbachev was given to, were “worthless,” since the Soviet social structure was not being transfigured. “It would be better to say simply that perestroika has something of a revolutionary character.” Even as moderate reform, Yeltsin continued, perestroika, or “restructuring,” had been more buzzword than reality. “Certain people are disinclined toward revolutionary changes. It is best to appraise the current period as one of new forms of work leading toward perestroika.” Yeltsin detoured to belittle a paragraph in the Gorbachev document claiming that the fundamentals of the regime guaranteed success: “The guarantees enumerated—the socialist system, the Soviet people, the party—have been around for lo these seventy years! So none of them is a guarantee against a return to the past.” The only insurance policy would be “democratization of all spheres of life,” and that had been barely put in motion, especially in spheres, such as local government, that dealt directly with people. Yeltsin ended with demands for identification by name of the authors of wrongful decisions in the present and past Soviet governments, for term limits for leaders, and for a discussion of ethnic relations in the USSR. Gorbachev said that Yeltsin’s time was up and stormed out of the room.16
When he resumed the chair a half hour later, Gorbachev made a scathing attack on the Moscow dynamo. “Boris Nikolayevich,” he observed, “deviates from our common assessment” by throwing out “loud and vacuous” reproofs. Personalized judgments had their place, but Yeltsin often lost sight of more general points and in Moscow was overseeing endless staff turnover and reorganization. “We cannot break the knees of the party and society. We need to speak respectfully about the party members who have been carrying and will carry the load and who are experiencing losses. They may have weaknesses but they have strengths, too.”17 The two swapped comments about Yeltsin’s overheated style, in which Yeltsin accepted Gorbachev’s rebuke only to hear Gorbachev restate it:
GORBACHEV: Let us not overdramatize, but this kind of conversation has been good for Boris Nikolayevich’s practical work. He cannot be immune to the criticism that he calls on all of us to make….
YELTSIN: I am a novice on the Politburo. For me this has been a lesson. I don’t think it came too late.
GORBACHEV: You and I have already had words on this subject. By all means, take the lesson to heart. This conversation has been necessary. But you are an emotional person. I don’t think your observations will change our attitude toward you. We have a high opinion of your work. Just remember that we have to work together. You are not to set yourself [apart from us] or to show off in front of your comrades.
“I was beside myself,” Yeltsin recounts, at Gorbachev’s “almost hysterical” reaction to his well-intentioned statement.18 In a birthday call to Vitalii Vorotnikov, the head of the Russian government, on January 20, Gorbachev confided that the Politburo skirmish had left him with a “sour aftertaste.” Yeltsin was getting too big for his britches, pinning the blame for every snafu on predecessors and superiors, and “playing around with the masses.”19 Yeltsin paid his respects to Vorotnikov and asked if he had been too abrupt at the meeting. You have every right to take part, Vorotnikov answered, but you should do it more calmly and self-effacingly. “You are forever the accuser, the exposer. You speak acerbically, categorically. You can’t get away with that.”20
And so it went until October 1987. At some gatherings of the leadership, the archives reveal, Yeltsin and Gorbachev butted heads; at others, Yeltsin kept silent or limited himself to needling. He was, he says, the odd man out or a queer fish (chudak) in the collective.21 In the Politburo on March 24, he sniped at the foreign-language “special schools” for the offspring of Moscow VIPs, which drew an answering fusillade from Gorbachev and Ligachëv. On April 23 Gorbachev denounced press articles on limousines, clinics, and other nomenklatura privileges, such as had been printed in the pages of Moskovskaya pravda; Yeltsin replied that reasonable explanations of the privileges, if justified by higher need, had to be given to the media and the people. In Politburo discussions in April and May, Yeltsin gave an equivocal signal in favor of deep economic reform. He supported retention of central planning but composition of the plan “from below,” with slack targets whereby efficient firms, once they had met their output quotas, would hold back surplus production for reuse or sale at unregulated prices. It was a branching out from the “complex brigade” model he had favored in Sverdlovsk. On September 28 Yeltsin proclaimed at a Politburo session that the party had been caught with its head in the sand by the emergence of the neformaly, the extra-governmental, informal organizations, and that the Komsomol was ossified and was proving incapable of offering Soviet youth alternatives to them. “It does nothing itself and only interferes with others.” Mobilization of old-style party propagandists into the youth league, as had been advised, “will bring no results.” And the sputtering economy was turning the population away from perestroika: “We said that in two years there would be an improvement. But there have not been any discernible changes. So questions arise. ‘There was one period when it got better [people say], but once again… ’”22