A Russian who read between the lines in Pravda on November 13, 1987, could have extracted six claims about the political situation:
Obstructed reforms. Change in Soviet communism was being thwarted by know-nothings in the nomenklatura. Real as opposed to rhetorical change was going at a snail’s pace.
An impatient nation. Ordinary people’s hopes had been raised and their patience was wearing thin. They were a constituency for a different course.
Gorbachev in the middle. The originator of perestroika was a gradualist who knew about the impediments to reform but was unwilling to dislodge them.
A radical alternative. A maverick, Yeltsin, had championed a speedier course. This marked him for payback by vested interests.
Not just talk. The bellwether of change was not a chatterer but a doer. He had street smarts. He knew from the inside how the wheels turned, in the provinces and in the Kremlin. Forgoing an influential post demonstrated his willingness to give something up for the common good.
Something to hide. The authorities had persecuted Yeltsin for puncturing the verities of the regime. Now they were muzzling him and were not putting out a complete account.
For Mikhail Gorbachev, the short-term victor, some of these claims were more easily countered than others. When students in the capital city passed around pro-Yeltsin petitions and marched in the streets, the uniformed and secret police kept watch on them. Several hundred demonstrators gathered on November 14 in downtown Sverdlovsk; on November 15 Yurii Petrov, Yeltsin’s friend and the first secretary of the obkom, received a delegation and accepted a protest letter addressed to the Politburo. Afraid of rallies “in the guise of preparations for the New Year’s holiday,” the obkom would in December cordon off 1905 Square.4
The censors decreed a media blackout on these events, and Kremlin agitprop was able to circulate an airbrushed account of the affair. But word of the petitions and demonstrations, and rumors of what Yeltsin had said to the Central Committee, spread like wildfire through the Moscow political underground and the foreign media. One of the more cockeyed simulations of the speech was prepared by Mikhail Poltoranin of Moskovskaya pravda. He was about to be dismissed as editor, but before he was, the Secretariat directed him to speak to 700 personnel from the Soviet local press gathered in a Central Committee academy in Moscow. The newspapermen wanted to know what Yeltsin had actually said to the October plenum, which Poltoranin was not of the rank to have attended. In his apartment that night, he pecked out on his typewriter an apocryphal speech—the one he would have wanted Yeltsin to make. Knowing how unloved Raisa Gorbacheva was, he put into Yeltsin’s mouth words about how she had telephoned him with peremptory instructions on party business. Poltoranin ran off several hundred copies and distributed them the next day without anyone stopping him.5
Gorbachev would have done well to release the transcript of the plenum. His more enlightened advisers held that declassification would confute the untruths being told about it and that news about Yeltsin’s disjointed performance would be unflattering to him. To stonewall, they said, would put the nimbus of “a martyr for justice” around his head.6 The original secret speech by Khrushchev, circulated in redacted form to party members in 1956, was not published in full in the USSR until 1989. Gorbachev moved more quickly than that, but not quickly enough. It took until March of 1989 for the plenum transcript to appear on the page.
Draconian measures against Yeltsin were not feasible at a time when Gorbachev was liberalizing the Soviet system. Criminal proceedings were out of the question. Yeltsin had parliamentary immunity as a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet. This never stopped Stalin’s OGPU or NKVD, but for a deputy to be arrested in 1987, the Soviet would have had to vote to lift the exemption and spark a national and international furor.7 And glasnost would have been no panacea. The unvarnished truth would only verify that in-house foes of reform existed, that Gorbachev was hugging the political center, and that Yeltsin had a more forward posture and was waylaid for it. And full disclosure of the context would have shown that Yeltsin’s diagnosis of perestroika was onto something—that the Soviet economy and society were deteriorating. Petroleum production of the USSR had gone into decline in 1985, petrodollars from exports were sharply down (mostly due to a dropoff in world oil prices), and the finances of the government were under strain more than since the 1940s.8 In the teeth of this, the firing of Yeltsin and even his penance, which most would have assumed was offered under duress, made him a magnet for popular discontent. “In the Russian tradition,” as one former Soviet publicist was to write of him, “the aggrieved mutineer earns the sympathy and benevolence of the common people.”9
The great Cossack mutineers of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, Stenka Razin and Yemel’yan Pugachëv, paid for their impudence with their heads.10 This twentieth-century mutineer kept his. The executioner’s axe and the Gulag being unavailable, what was Gorbachev going to do with him?
If history were the touchstone, Gorbachev had little to worry about. As far back as the 1920s, the also-rans in personality and factional quarrels within the party had never recouped their losses. The renunciation of violence after Stalin left general secretaries with ample means for sidelining an opponent. Gorbachev made it plain to Yeltsin that he was ostracized from upper-level political activity. How the ban was expressed depends on whose memoir one reads. Yeltsin says it was permanent and generaclass="underline" “I will no longer let you take part in politics [politika].” Gorbachev writes in his Life and Reforms of saying to Yeltsin that he “could not return to the sphere of big-time politics [sfera bol’shoi politiki] any time soon,” which connotes a door ajar.11 Gorbachev might have wielded a much heavier truncheon than this. He could have pensioned Yeltsin off, a possibility that surfaced in irritable conversations between them in November 1987. Gorbachev did not want this solution. He wisecracked to Yeltsin that he was against retirement since, they being the same age, it might be thought appropriate for him as well.12 Yeltsin was still a member of the CPSU Central Committee. Under the rulebook, only a congress of the party could expel him against his will, but Gorbachev was capable of forcing him to resign. In fact he did that to ninety-eight longin-the-tooth members of the committee in April 1989, but not to Yeltsin. Another device forsworn was to make Yeltsin ambassador to a distant capital—as Nikita Khrushchev did in 1957 when he made Vyacheslav Molotov, who had been prime minister under Stalin, Soviet envoy to Outer Mongolia.13 Yeltsin believed Gorbachev preferred to keep him in Moscow and in his sights: “He thought I was less of a risk nearby. It is always best to keep a freethinker close at hand, so you can keep him under observation. And what would an ambassador be up to? Who knew?”14
So why the lenience? In his memoirs, Gorbachev credits it to his chivalry (“It is not in me to make short work of people”) and collectivism (“the strong belief that with us everything had to be done on the basis of comradeship”).15 But it was not all about the kindliness of the general secretary. Yeltsin points to a more political theory, that Gorbachev wanted him to survive as a balance against conservatives and fence-sitters: “It seems to me that if Gorbachev had not had a Yeltsin he would have had to invent one.”16 Gorbachev’s desire to use Yeltsin as a counterweight dovetailed with his reading of the past record, which was that no one in Yeltsin’s unenviable predicament could pose a threat. To these, there needs to be added an attitudinal factor: cocksureness. Georgii Shakhnazarov, Gorbachev’s main political aide, several times implored him to expatriate Yeltsin, to an ambassadorship, and absent him from the upcoming USSR elections. Gorbachev would not countenance it. “He regarded Yeltsin as semiliterate, as understanding nothing, as a drunkard.” He sorely misjudged Yeltsin and, says the cerebral Shakhnazarov, refused to see that Yeltsin’s personality, the festering grudge Yeltsin bore, and the pentup appetite for change might commix into “an explosive force.”17