About October 1987, Yeltsin was obdurate. He demanded restitution, contrasting that to the posthumous amends being made to people purged by Stalin decades before:
Comrade delegates, rehabilitation after fifty years has become the norm, and this has a healthy effect on our society. But I am requesting my political rehabilitation while I am alive. I consider this a question of principle…. You all know that my speech to the October plenum of the Central Committee was found to be “politically erroneous.” But the questions I brought up at the plenum have since that time been raised repeatedly in the press and by communists. Here virtually all of these questions have sounded in the reports and speeches given from the tribune. I consider the only error in my presentation to have been that I spoke out at an inopportune time, right before the seventieth anniversary of October 1917…. We all have to master the rules of political discussion, to tolerate opponents, as Lenin did, and not rush to hang labels on them or to brand them heretics.
In one swoop, Yeltsin had publicly affiliated himself with diversification of the political system and justice for the ghosts of the Soviet past—and had tarred Gorbachev and those who laid him low in 1987 with intolerance and rigidity. As Vitalii Tret’yakov was to put it, “These two words, ‘political rehabilitation,’ intuitively found by Yeltsin, were a godsend—a wondrous public-relations move, we would say today, one that a thousand first-class political technologists and image makers would never have come up with.”29
After Yeltsin left the stage, every second speaker roasted him. Most had been put up to it by Lev Zaikov and the Moscow party staff, who assumed that Yeltsin would find a way to get to the microphone. Ligachëv, whom some of Gorbachev’s men tried to dissuade from speaking, was the most vituperative, maximizing their differences and saying he and Yeltsin diverged not only in tactics but in strategy. “Boris, you [ty] are wrong,” he said in a concluding sentence that would be flung back in his face over the next two years. A Sverdlovsk delegate, Vladimir Volkov, the party secretary of the Kalinin missile plant, extolled Yeltsin and won applause for it. Gorbachev had wanted to concentrate on his leaderly agenda, but expended almost half of his conference encore on Yeltsin. “Here he has some kind of a complex,” Anatolii Chernyayev entered in his diary.30
For the Yeltsin story, the striking thing about the conference was the entrenchment of the political cleavage opened up by his secret speech in October 1987. The party did not rehabilitate its freelancer. Beyond the crenellated Kremlin walls, Lev Sukhanov said, he had achieved “the popular acclaim any politician can only dream about.”31
Yeltsin did not see it this way at first. He once again felt sorry for himself over the invective by Ligachëv and the conservatives: “A feeling of apathy washed over me. I did not want struggle, not explanations, not anything. All I wanted was to forget it all and be left in peace.” The heartsickness lasted only a few weeks. He was cheered up by the thousands of letters and telegrams that arrived from all over the Soviet Union. The subject matter of most of them was not any particular political line but, says Yeltsin, compassion for him as having been mistreated. Through these communications from afar, people “stretched out their hands to me, and I was able to lean on them and get back on my feet.”32 Yeltsin’s dislike of elite privilege did not keep him from leaving for vacation at a government rest house in Jurmala, Latvia. When he returned, citizens began showing up in droves to see him. Batalin had a reception area installed near the Gosstroi checkpoint where those not admitted to his office could write out questions for him.33
The new Yeltsin was sought after by other agents of change. In August 1988, for example, he agreed to join the supervisory board of the Memorial Society, the new nongovernmental organization for promoting construction of a monument in Moscow to the millions imprisoned and murdered under Stalin. He was chosen for this honor on write-in ballots by readers of the newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta and the magazine Ogonëk. These publications were favorites of the Russian intelligentsia, with whom Yeltsin had few connections.34 Yeltsin was also seeing how reporters and editors could be allies. Jonathan Sanders, a Moscow producer for CBS News, arranged several Yeltsin interviews and decided to buy him a red-striped Brooks Brothers necktie while on home leave in New York. He spotted Yeltsin walking down the Gosstroi steps, explained that he had to be punctilious about giving a politician a present, but handed him the tie anyway. Yeltsin put it on admiringly and wrapped his own tie around Sanders’s neck, turning the scene into an exchange of tokens of respect.35 An invitation by students to answer questions at the Higher Komsomol School on November 12, 1988, gave him further scope. Shortly after the session, Sukhanov found a counterfeit transcript of Yeltsin’s remarks for sale on Arbat Street. “I showed him this ‘commercial copy’ and he asked, ‘Why have we not made our own transcript ?’ A very good question. So he put his daughters Tanya and Lena to work and they typed up a tape of the session that Sasha Korzhakov had made.” Twelve carbon copies were distributed through informal networks. Cooperative journalists used every trick in the book to get the text published. In the Perm youth paper, they got the editor to agree by giving it the title “Politician or Roughneck?”36
Yeltsin was increasingly willing to moor his critique in unblinking views of the Soviet past. Russians, he said to the Komsomol students, were submissive because they learned to be that way from “parasitic” party and state structures that monopolized power, hid behind a veil of secrecy, and taught individuals to make “a ritual of the bearing of sacrifices” at every turn. It all went back to a history in which one cannot help see the experience of the Urals and of the Yeltsin family: “First the people were forced to put on the altar an inhuman agricultural policy [collectivization], then they were required to give up such timeless values as spirituality and culture, and finally they were divested of the ability to define their goals self-reliantly [samostoyatel’no] and to go about attaining them self-reliantly.”37
When the talk turned to remedies, Yeltsin was not a flaming militant. Besides his now faddish populism, the pillars of his approach were outspokenness, the need for reform to show results, and support for political competition and inclusiveness. His forté was not the clairvoyant pronouncement but the folksy verbalization of what many others were already thinking and had been subdued from saying in public. Yeltsin, as a Moscow academic was to say after one of his more plain-spoken statements, was giving voice to “what the people have freely talked about for ages” in their kitchens or at their dachas.38 To put it in the more formal language of anthropology, he was a leader in the “discursive deconstruction” of the late Soviet system, taking apart meanings that were increasingly disconnected from reality.39 On the economic and social front, he was for a cooling of the polemics and for brass-tacks improvements in living standards. Although he mentioned a few action steps, such as a hike in the output of consumer goods and building supplies to be funded by cuts to the construction and space budgets, he laid out no general conception of reform. At the Komsomol academy, he held his thoughts on it for his edification alone: “I have stuffed them far down in the archives, in a safe, so that no one sees them.”40 It was a subterfuge his enraptured listeners let him get away with. In a New Year’s interview with newspaperman Pavel Voshchanov, who would be his press secretary in 1991–92, Yeltsin said he wanted to annul the “double privileges” built into the Soviet system, so that a ruble earned by a government minister would buy the same goods and services as a ruble earned by the janitor in the ministry’s headquarters.41 But this was more a design for redressing past abuses than for building a productive and equitable economy.