At the marathon Politburo meeting of October 15, by which time their relations were on the rocks, Gorbachev refuted commentary Yeltsin made on the 120-page draft of his address marking the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7. In Life and Reforms, Gorbachev characterizes Yeltsin’s comments as “saturated by a spirit of great caution and conservatism,” in contrast to his own latitudinarian views.23 So black-and-white an interpretation is hard to sustain from the archival record.
Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin were unsure about how far to go in revising the Soviet past. In the October 15 discussion, Gorbachev differed from the communist catechism on many issues.24 Yet he defended Stalin’s crushing of Trotskyism and other intraparty opposition groups, his wartime leadership of the fatherland, and “the liquidation of the kulaks as a class” during collectivization, reminiscing here about the organizing efforts of his grandfather in their birthplace of Privol’noye. Yeltsin—from a family of dispossessed kulaks—avoided collectivization and Stalin’s attacks on the opposition and wartime leadership, but spoke on a host of other historical issues. One unifying point for him was the need to recognize the past contribution of rank-and-file citizens and communists. In 1917 the party found out “how to win over the majority of the population and of the soviets [elected councils]” to its side; Germany would not have been defeated in 1945 without the unselfishness of anonymous workers and foot soldiers. Yeltsin asked for elucidation of the role of Lenin and—shades of his adolescent inquiries in Berezniki—for inclusion in the jubilee report of some evaluations of Lenin’s revolutionary contemporaries. Toward the end, he telegraphed irritation at the effort being spent on the past, since what mattered most to society was a decent life in the present. His plea was for a stock taking, a summary in Gorbachev’s speech about the Soviet experiment and the path ahead.
The declassified transcript shows Gorbachev taking to heart the question about the velocity of reform, though not quite as Yeltsin did. On other items, he tut-tutted Yeltsin for artlessness with reference to Lenin and, in Aesopian language, for his self-centeredness:
YELTSIN: I think that besides Lenin we need to name [in the report] his closest comrades-in-arms.
GORBACHEV: Whom do you have in mind?
YELTSIN: I have in mind [Yakov] Sverdlov, [Felix] Dzerzhinsky, [Mikhail] Kalinin, [Mikhail] Frunze.
GORBACHEV: Look, don’t be so simplistic. Here in my briefcase I have a list of members of the Politburo under Lenin. Wouldn’t those be his closest comrades-in-arms? Yes, that is right. And you wish to give names from today’s point of view, whom you like and whom you do not. That would be incorrect…. [Gorbachev speaks of some personalities from the 1920s and 1930s and reviews their policy positions.] The question being settled here was where the country was headed…. But personal needs were folded into these struggles…. When it comes to subjective aspects at the level of high politics, and when it touches on big-time politicians, then frequently these personal ambitions, pretensions, the inability to work in the collective, and so on and so forth are capable of warping the person’s political position. All of this, you have to understand, is not a simple thing, it is a delicate interaction….
YELTSIN: A very important theme is… the time frame in which perestroika, now that it has begun, is to occur. People are looking for a very stringent formulation. But we are still writing out that perestroika is going to take fifteen to twenty years, that is, it is a long-range policy. We have to solve our most crying problems in two, three, five years, that’s all there is to it. We must say this.
GORBACHEV: I am the one who thought it best to say perestroika would take fifteen to twenty years, but the report has a line about it taking a generation… and a generation is longer than fifteen or twenty years. Thank you. It is good that you paid attention to this. The question about time frame is worth thinking about, because it is very important. You are right, people are watching this….
YELTSIN: The last thing I would say is, we have a ton of experience on all these matters. So what have these seventy years brought us? What suggests itself is a section that sums things up. GORBACHEV: We took the correct road, that is what I would conclude.
Gorbachev’s greater attachment to the road taken, and to theories of socialism, rings out. Yeltsin’s emphasis was on how effectively or ineffectively systems worked. If they did not, he implied, society would have to find ones that did.
An antagonism with Yegor Ligachëv, the second-in-command to Gorbachev, also ballooned. The two already differed on minor patronage and organizational issues. In late 1986, for example, Yeltsin walked out of a Politburo session when Ligachëv presented his choice for president of the Urals branch of the Academy of Sciences, located in Sverdlovsk. Yeltsin had not been asked his opinion, and the appointee, physicist Gennadii Mesyats, was from Tomsk, where Ligachëv had been party leader, and was given the job over the Sverdlovsker whom Yeltsin had in mind.25 So far as the Moscow first secretaryship went, Ligachëv was resolved not to let Yeltsin evade Kremlin scrutiny and control, as he was persuaded Viktor Grishin had done under Brezhnev. Once Ligachëv and his operatives had determined to keep a close eye, physical propinquity on Old Square allowed them to do so.26 As the organizational vicar of the CPSU, Ligachëv disliked what he saw as Yeltsin’s smears of the party apparatus on issues such as privilege, corruption, and dogmatism. Yeltsin in turn felt Ligachëv was braking progress and using his staff to undercut him.
For Yeltsin, it especially rankled that he had far less autonomy in the Moscow position than in Sverdlovsk and less, for that matter, than when he served as a Central Committee department head in 1985. At the Central Committee plenum in June 1987, he blasted Ligachëv: “We know, Yegor Kuz’mich, that the Secretariat is working hard. But still [we see] a profusion of petty questions, no letup in the volume of paper, undue tutelage, administration by command, over-regulation of the party organs, and continual visits by commissions chiefly to dig up negative examples.” “Practically nothing” had changed here since 1985 and nothing would until the party center gave local leaders room to exercise that distinctive Urals quality, self-reliance.27 Things were such, he told Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov in a chat, that Ligachëv had phoned him to complain that the lawn in front of Luzhniki, the city’s main soccer stadium, was poorly mowed.28 To Moskovskaya pravda’s Mikhail Poltoranin, Yeltsin said that Ligachëv had him “account for every pencil and scrap of paper” and “put him in the shoes of a little boy.”29