Even pushing on Gorbachev to change policy was dicey, given past Soviet practice. Nor was Yeltsin adhering to a well-defined program or set of ideas. His perception that Gorbachev was acting timidly, and that he as a result should recalibrate his position, was grounded more in an almost feline instinct for the moment than in ideology. Gorbachev’s feet were still firmly planted in Marxism-Leninism. Now and over the next four years, inasmuch as he resonated to instincts at all, they were, in a manner of speaking, canine—trained, trainable, tied to the known and to the previously rewarded.52
Once the hunch took with Yeltsin, he acted as he had at times in the past, going beyond survival, duty, success, and testing to revisit the dormant rebellion script. In Confession, he explicitly drew the parallel to a simple act of defiance back in his adolescence—at his commencement from elementary school. In the school hall, he had piped up, “almost as at the October plenum of the Central Committee,”53 and announced to horrified parents and staff that his homeroom teacher was not fit for her job. But Sverdlov Hall in the Moscow Kremlin was, to say the least, a more consequential stage for rebellion than Railway School No. 95 in inconspicuous Berezniki. And, although Yeltsin concentrated in 1987 on his immediate superior, Ligachëv, as he said it had been on his teacher in 1945 or 1946, this time he also went after the headmaster. The Khrushchev secret speech was about the Stalinist past and attempted to absolve the current leadership of responsibility for that past. The Yeltsin secret speech was about the Gorbachevian present and attempted to make the person and the group in charge responsible for the malpractice of reform.
When Yeltsin was back in his seat, Gorbachev took control from Ligachëv. He was, noticed Valerii Boldin, his chief of staff, “livid with rage” at the monkey wrench Yeltsin had thrown and at the claim about kowtowing to Gorbachev as general secretary.54 Still, Gorbachev did have options. He could have voiced receptivity and asked Yeltsin to explicate his points. He could have picked some of them apart. Yeltsin had cast aspersions on Gorbachev for exalting palaver over action; the same could have been shown to apply to some degree to Yeltsin’s speech. Or Gorbachev could have finagled the matter by undertaking to review it with Yeltsin or to refer it to the Politburo. That he did not do so is proof that by the time Yeltsin’s speech was over Gorbachev had shifted to giving his uppity associate a dose of his own medicine.
In high dudgeon, Gorbachev rejected Yeltsin’s position that the Moscow party organization should be left to decide on his standing there: “We seem to be talking here about the separation of the Moscow party organization [from the party as a whole]… about a desire to fight with the Central Committee.” Under the “democratic centralism” bolted in place by Lenin and Stalin, local and regional leaders served for the good of the whole and bowed to the will of higher-ups. It was anathema for the Moscow committee, and not the Politburo and the Central Committee apparatus, to choose the city’s party boss.55 Gorbachev then solicited opinions, signaling that he had made willingness to berate Yeltsin a badge of loyalty to him.56
Nine Politburo members—Ligachëv, Prime Minister Ryzhkov, Vitalii Vorotnikov, Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia (Gorbachev’s foreign minister), and Viktor Chebrikov (the chairman of the KGB), inter alia—spoke against Yeltsin. All were willing and even happy to oblige, although later Ryzhkov and some others would hold it against Gorbachev that he had not let them in on Yeltsin’s September letter.57 A parade of fifteen officials and two blue-collar workers then had at Yeltsin. It was four hours’ worth of imprecations, with time off for a recess in which Yeltsin stood alone. Some committee members approached Gorbachev at the break to demand that Yeltsin be expelled from the Central Committee; Gorbachev refused.58 Several members long affiliated with Yeltsin, such as Yurii Petrov, his successor in the Sverdlovsk obkom, and Arkadii Vol’skii, who had tried to bring him to Moscow in the Andropov years, did not respond to Gorbachev’s invitation to attack him verbally. Several others, notably Mayor Saikin, Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev, the Sverdlovsker Gennadii Kolbin (now party first secretary in Kazakhstan), and academician Georgii Arbatov, showed some fellow feeling for him even as they got in their digs. Saikin truly stuck his neck out. He was opposed to Yeltsin’s speech and underlined that he had no forewarning of it (he was right off a plane from Beijing), but said there had been some achievements in Moscow since 1985 that Yeltsin had “worked around the clock” to bring about.59 The rest ranged from the admonitory to the abusive. These rejoinders were as new as Yeltsin’s almost unrehearsed piece. Since Stalin’s time, would-be speakers at Central Committee plenums had requested a place on the docket weeks ahead, written out their remarks, and filed them with the Secretariat before meeting day.
Ligachëv led off by demanding to know why Yeltsin had been unengaged at many Politburo meetings; the answer must be that all along Yeltsin had knavishly been collecting materials for use in his speech to the plenum.60 If Ligachëv’s venom was predictable, some blows smarted more—they were acts of “betrayal,” Yeltsin later said.61 They came from several provincial party bosses, from Yakov Ryabov, and from Politburo members Ryzhkov and Yakovlev. Boris Konoplëv, the first secretary in Perm oblast, where Yeltsin grew up, wrote Yeltsin’s presentation off to “either cluelessness about life or an effort to shove us aside and distort reality.” Ryabov, sponsor to Yeltsin in Sverdlovsk in the 1960s and 1970s and now ambassador to France, said he should never have drafted him into the party apparatus and promoted him, and ought to have been awake to his “delusions of grandeur.”62 Ryzhkov parroted Ligachëv’s charges and added ones of his own about “political nihilism” and a desire to split the Politburo. Yakovlev found that Yeltsin had displayed panic, “petit-bourgeois attitudes,” and an infatuation with “pseudo-revolutionary phrases.” Mikhail Solomentsev, a backer in 1985, faulted him for a tendency to accumulate hostilities the way a snowball does bits of gravel. Vorotnikov, also an early supporter, saw it differently: “At Politburo sessions, Boris Nikolayevich, you mostly keep to yourself. There is some kind of mask on your face the whole time. It was not that way when you were in Sverdlovsk…. You seem to feel malcontent with everyone and everything.” Chebrikov of the KGB reproved the sinner for never having “loved the people of Moscow” and for blabbing to foreign journalists.63
Shooting through the proceedings was paternalistic and pedagogical imagery. When Yeltsin toward the end tried a hangdog rebuttal, Gorbachev interrupted midsentence: “Boris Nikolayevich, are you so politically illiterate [bezgramotnyi] that we should be organizing a reading and writing class for you right here?” No, Yeltsin gulped. Gorbachev then pontificated on Yeltsin’s “hypertrophied self-love” and puerile need to have the country “revolve around your persona,” as the city had since 1985. Several accusers said Yeltsin would do well to think of the plenum and similar conclaves as a rectifying “school” for his “political immaturity [nezrelost’].” Shevardnadze, after Yakovlev the most liberal member of the Politburo, inveighed against his “irresponsibility” and “primitivism.” Stepan Shalayev, the chairman of the Soviet trade unions, said Yeltsin should have been heedful of Ligachëv, whose apparatus was “a great school for each communist who takes part in its work,” a point also taken up by Ryzhkov. Yeltsin dawdled in enlisting in the party in the 1960s, stated Sergei Manyakin, and never was tempered as a communist and citizen; Ligachëv had erred in coddling Yeltsin and not “thumping the table with his fist” at Yeltsin’s roguery.64