As Yeltsin gave his letter to the courier on September 12, he was to recall, he foresaw two options: “If they ousted me,… I would take up independent political activity…. If they did not oust me, I would appeal to the plenum of the Central Committee.”39 His upbeat attitude is hard to fathom. Basmanovo or Butka homesteaders and maybe Sverdlovsk civil engineers could forage on their own—the word Yeltsin used for “independent” (samostoyatel’nyi) is the adjectival form of “self-reliance.” What, however, would political independence be in a country where one centralized party still controlled government and its means of violence, the media, and the economy? As for the Central Committee as a court of appeal, Yeltsin did not know if he would be afforded the floor. If he were able to speak, he might find some committee backing, but to suborn members would have been “sacrilegious,” as he was to say to the plenum, and would not have gone undetected.40 He mulled over a third course and mentioned it to Naina: to write a special letter to the members of the Politburo. He rejected it; a letter could influence no one except possibly for Aleksandr Yakovlev, the Central Committee secretary who was the most change-acceptant of Gorbachev’s wards.41
The Central Committee met two or three times a year in Sverdlov Hall, in the eighteenth-century Building No. 1 of the Kremlin. The hall was a magnificent rotunda, ninety feet high and ringed in light Corinthian pillars and pilasters and a narrow gallery above. The plenum of Wednesday, October 21, was billed as a sedate affair. It was to consist of hearing out the Politburo-approved text of Gorbachev’s report commemorating the revolution, which was scheduled for delivery on November 2, and party etiquette prescribed early adjournment without discussion, followed by a pleasant luncheon together. Yeltsin was seated in the front row; only the full members of the Politburo were on the presidium, or presiding panel, which looked down on the Central Committee members, alternates, and guests across a skirted desk. He was unsure until the last about whether to try to speak. At about eleven A.M., as Gorbachev finished up, Yeltsin scribbled a few “theses” on one of the red cards used to register votes at Soviet committees and assemblies. He raised his good, right hand shakily in the air. Stage fright hit and he took it down. Gorbachev pointed him out to Ligachëv, who was chairing. Ligachëv asked the members if they wanted to open discussion of the report; when several said they did not, he motioned to Yeltsin that he would not get to speak. Yeltsin took to his feet and was again repelled by Ligachëv. Gorbachev interjected a second time: “Comrade Yeltsin has some kind of announcement.” Only then did Ligachëv surrender the microphone.
Why ever did Gorbachev override Ligachëv? He had to know Yeltsin was up to no good. The circumstances prompt the surmise that the general secretary thought he would kill two birds with one stone by letting the Moscow boss have the floor. One benefit would be to apply pressure on the party to get with the program of reform, on the rationale that incremental change was to be preferred to the shocks favored by Yeltsin. The other potential advantage was the chance for Gorbachev and his followers in the Central Committee to reply to and chasten the hotheadedness of Yeltsin, which could have led to further sanctions.42 Like Yeltsin’s decision to speak out, Gorbachev’s decision to allow him to speak carried its own heavy risks.
No drumroll announced Yeltsin’s cri de coeur. In Vitalii Vorotnikov’s words, he “strode up onto the dais. Clearly agitated, he took a pause and began to speak. He talked at first confusedly and then with more assurance, but without his usual force. Somehow, he was semi-apologetic and semiaccusatory, trying continuously to contain his passions.”43 Gorbachev remembers in his memoirs a similarly “strange composite” of feelings on Yeltsin’s face. The combination, he says in one of his off-the-shelf digs at Yeltsin, was what you got from “an unbalanced nature.”44
Yeltsin’s nine hundred words—his secret speech—lasted all of six or seven minutes.45 In form, they will not put anyone in mind of Pericles’ Funeral Oration or the Gettysburg Address or even of the original secret speech by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, with its gripping, four-hour narrative of arrest, torture, and gore under Stalin. Yeltsin gave mostly a rambling rerun of the letter of September 12 and of oral statements at meetings, open and closed.46 Items about Ligachëv and hidebound Soviet bureaucracy tripped out pell-mell. The only concrete anecdote Yeltsin gave of messed-up reform was the workaday one of his inability to cut back on the number of research institutes in Moscow, as he had promised to do in 1986.47
What was lacking in fluency and lawyer’s points Yeltsin made up for in audacity and heat. He wanted “to say everything that is in my soul, what is in my heart, and what is in me as a communist.” He unloaded three bombshells. The first was a sharpened position on how the mass of the population was tuning out the reform process. “People’s faith has begun to ebb.” Unless results were hewed to match promises, “we may well find that the authority of the party as a whole will diminish in the people’s eyes.” Yeltsin made the point clumsily, pushing both a stronger effort to make good on promises and a move away from the two- or three-year period he had spoken of in the Politburo on October 15. The second point was a call for “democratic forms” in Soviet politics, especially in the Communist Party, and disapproval of the growing sycophancy toward Gorbachev, which he said had the ring of a Stalin- or Brezhnev-like personality cult. Political deformations of this sort, Yeltsin asserted, accounted for the failures of the seventy years reviewed in Gorbachev’s report:
I must say that the lessons that come out of these seventy years are painful lessons. Yes, there have been victories, as Mikhail Sergeyevich has said, but there also have been… harsh lessons, serious defeats. These defeats took shape gradually. They happened because there was no collegiality [in the party], because cliques were formed, because the party’s power was delivered into a single pair of hands, because this one man was protected from all criticism.
Myself, I am disturbed that there is still not a good situation within the Politburo and that recently there has been a noticeable growth in what I can only call adulation of the general secretary on the part of certain members of the Politburo, certain members of long standing. This is impermissible now, at a time when we are introducing properly democratic and honorable relations toward one another, true comradely relations…. This is impermissible. I am all for criticizing people to their faces, eye-toeye, but not for being carried away by adulation, which can again become the norm, a cult of personality.48
These broadsides landed, Yeltsin’s peroration made his third point—repetition of the request to get him off the Politburo that he had initially made in writing on September 12. It was offered with an addendum that was not in the letter to Gorbachev but was part of his September 10 conversation with Naina: the afterthought that his position as Moscow first secretary should be considered by the city committee of the party and not solely by the Central Committee, which would have made it possible for him to remain Moscow party boss after departing the Politburo. Catcalls rang out when he made the last statement. As he took his seat again, “My heart was pounding and seemed ready to burst out of my chest.”49
Looked at in the sweep of Yeltsin’s life, the soliloquy was an instant of truth. He reflected on it in an interview fifteen years later as lonely and intimidating : “It was an expression of protest…. I had a venturesome attitude but no support…. I was all alone against this armada, this bulky and cumbersome communist thing, their KGB system.”50 There is some self-dramatization here, and not for the only time, but there is no denying that Yeltsin was tempting fate. Irrespective of the cries from the hall after he spoke that he was consumed by vainglory, the eruption was not the result of naked power-seeking, for, absent something to defuse the situation, retribution was foreordained as soon as he had gone through with it. As Anatolii Chernyayev dryly put it to Gorbachev in early November, Yeltsin “was not aiming for the top spot: He was smart enough not to count on it.”51