Yeltsin got with the spirit in his closing by describing the plenary as “a severe school… that will do me for my whole life.” He tried gamely to recycle several of his propositions in conciliatory form, saying, for instance, that his barb about hosannas to Gorbachev applied to only “two or three comrades.” And he allowed that he generally agreed with the assessment of him: “In speaking out today and letting down the Central Committee and the Moscow city organization, I made a mistake.” Gorbachev then asked if Yeltsin was capable of continuing with his work—a giveaway that he was open to a rapprochement, provided Yeltsin ate his words. Yeltsin would not and said again he wanted to be discharged. In his wrap-up, Gorbachev retracted the lifeline and moved that Yeltsin be censured for his “politically erroneous” outburst and that the Politburo and the Moscow committee meet to examine his status.65 Yeltsin, like everyone else, voted for the resolution.
There was still time to salvage something from the debacle. The Moscow party bureau met several days later, excoriated Yeltsin for putting them on the spot by speaking out without consultation, but passed a resolution that he should be permitted to stay as gorkom first secretary. They delegated the estimable Saikin to press this position with Gorbachev, yet the general secretary considered the case closed and would not meet with him. Yeltsin attended the Politburo meeting of October 31 and again asked pardon for his conduct ten days before. He informed members he would agree to the Moscow bureau’s proposal that he remain in his local position—an initiative that went unmentioned in his memoirs:
I am suffering keenly from the criticism of my presentation to the [Central Committee] plenum. The reason for my statement was my worry that perestroika had gained momentum and now we are losing that momentum. I am prepared to continue to work. We need to hold course on perestroika. I confess that I took too much upon myself, that I am guilty [in this regard]. I had still not seen or really felt what I was guilty of. Since the middle of 1986, I have felt a powerful psychological overload. I should have gone openly with this to my comrades on the gorkom and Politburo. But my self-love interposed, and that was my main mistake. I am now ready to speak with Yegor Kuz’mich [Ligachëv], Aleksandr Nikolayevich [Yakovlev], and Georgii Petrovich [Razumovskii, a deputy of Ligachëv’s]. My gorkom comrades have not turned away from me. They are asking me to stay, although they also condemn my speech.
Gorbachev listened impassively.66
On November 3 Yeltsin sent the general secretary a letter repeating his request. Gorbachev consulted with several Politburo members and called him at work to turn it down summarily. He was fed up with indulging Yeltsin and now had a new plaint: Yeltsin had not disavowed bastard versions of his October 21 speech that were popping up in Moscow and in the world press. “He [Yeltsin] ostensibly perceives himself a ‘popular hero,’” the general secretary exclaimed to staff.67 The underlying worry was that Yeltsin’s conceit was shared by the crowd.
It is mind-boggling how close the two gladiators came to a compromise. On October 21, even after Yeltsin refused to withdraw his resignation request, Gorbachev said to the plenum that the position of Moscow party chief might not be “beyond his powers” in the long term, if Yeltsin were “able to draw the correct conclusions” and work well.68 Yeltsin did eat humble pie on October 31 and November 3. As late as November 10, Anatolii Chernyayev was recommending to Gorbachev in a letter that he conserve Yeltsin as an ally, in a manifestation of magnanimity and reformism, and not drive him into the ranks of the outcast.69 Yeltsin could have been left in the Moscow position with a slap on the wrist—not a kick in the groin. And he could have been wheedled into signing a nonaggression pact that would take him out of the Politburo, something he had wanted since September, with eligibility for a return. Had this been done, as Yeltsin theorized in an interview in 2002, “History might have veered in a different direction.”70
On November 7, the anniversary of the revolution, Yeltsin was on the Lenin Mausoleum reviewing stand with the other Soviet leaders, waving at the tanks and rockets in the military parade. Fidel Castro of Cuba, who admired his spunk (and later was to despise his policies), came up and gave him a rib-crunching hug. At the Kremlin reception for the diplomatic corps, Yeltsin, U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock wrote, stood apart from his Politburo colleagues, “bore a rather sheepish smile, and periodically shifted his stance from one foot to the other, rather like a schoolboy who had been scolded by the teacher.”71
During the holiday—reading by now off of a primordial script for survival—Yeltsin got the family together to ponder his plight. Would he get work in industry, be rusticated to Sverdlovsk, or worse? His distress took a morbid turn on November 9. He was found dripping in blood in the dressing room off of his Old Square office and whisked by ambulance to the TsKB (Central Clinical Hospital, the main Kremlin hospital) on Michurin Prospect. He had slashed the left side of his rib cage and stomach with office scissors. The weapon chosen and the injury, too superficial to require stitches, indicate it was a howl of anger, frustration, and perhaps self-hate rather than an act of suicide. Of his hospitalization, Yeltsin has said no more than that he had “a breakdown” (sryv), headaches, chest pains, and heart palpitations: “My organism could not stand the nervous strain.”72 Naina Yeltsina cared sufficiently about her husband’s mental state to have his head bodyguard, Yurii Kozhukhov, remove hunting knives, guns, and glass objects from their home and dacha before his return, and to tell a friend later she had taken precautions against an overdose with prescription drugs.73
The nadir for Yeltsin was the city party plenum called by Gorbachev and Ligachëv for the evening of Wednesday, November 11. Gorbachev phoned him in his TsKB room that morning to tell him KGB officers would come for him. He cut short Yeltsin’s protestations that he was too ill even to walk unassisted to the toilet; the doctors would help, Gorbachev retorted. Only at this stage did the general secretary canvass Yevgenii Chazov, by this time the Soviet minister of health, who warned him that participation in any public meeting would be a danger to Yeltsin’s health; Gorbachev replied that the matter was settled and Yeltsin had given his agreement.74 Naina was in her husband’s room when the guards arrived at Michurin Prospect, and she wanted him to refuse to cooperate. He disagreed because he still hoped against hope that some would side with him, and even that he might win a vote of confidence, and because he was afraid that not to go would be taken as cowardice and would leave pro-Yeltsin members of the Moscow bureau in the lurch. Yeltsin feared a replay of the post–World War II Leningrad affair, when the leadership of the USSR’s second city was decapitated on Stalin’s orders. Until he mentioned this to Naina, she had urged him to stay in the hospital, “And then there was nothing I could do.”75 In light of later events, it is of note that one of Stalin’s accusations against the Leningraders in 1949–50 was that they were scheming to set the Russian republic against the central government.76