In the political realm, Yeltsin was for the liberalization of electoral laws enacted after the Nineteenth Conference and fought measures, such as Gorbachev’s provision to have party secretaries chair local councils, that might adulterate the reform. What about the Communist Party and its “leading role”? At the conference in July, Yeltsin favored “socialist pluralism,” Gorbachev’s shorthand for heterogeneity within the ruling party, and came out against a system containing two socialist parties. By late 1988, he was telling his wife over the dinner table that multiparty democracy, without limitations, was inescapable. Naina was quizzicaclass="underline" “I told him, ‘Borya, what are you talking about? It is too early. Why say such a thing?’ And he said, ‘Well, you see, all this will come about, it will all come to this.’”42 But at the Komsomol school Yeltsin dodged questions about the supremacy of the CPSU and made seven well-behaved references to Lenin. He was asked, since “your popularity with the people is not less” than Gorbachev’s, “could you be head of the party and state?” Once there was full-fledged competition, Yeltsin answered demurely, “I may participate a little, as they say.”43 He was still denying advocacy of multipartism in mid-March 1989, right before the Soviet parliamentary elections, while calling for a discussion of its advisability.
Coyness about an overt challenge to Gorbachev fooled no one. Yeltsin had by this time traversed the threshold dividing dissidence, or criticism of those in power, from opposition, or activity aimed at gaining power.44 And the general secretary could hear his footfall. “Indubitably,” recalled Georgii Shakhnazarov, “Gorbachev saw in Yeltsin his principal rival for the future. Possessing a low opinion of [Yeltsin’s] intellect and his other qualities, he feared not the person-to-person competition but the very fact of the appearance of a leader of the opposition.”45 Shakhnazarov did not share Gorbachev’s complacency about Yeltsin and repeated the advice to send him to a cushy, faraway embassy and so keep him out of the 1989 national elections. Gorbachev turned a deaf ear.
One of the reasons Yeltsin accepted speaking engagements, and stood on the stage for hours, was to prove that he was out of his sickbed. Of the encounter at the Komsomol school, Sukhanov writes: “In speaking without a gap, he was able to exhibit that he was in good shape physically. He was rumored to be seriously ill, and he did not want to look impotent and pitiable.”46 The students asked how he had handled the slings and arrows of the past year. He answered in high testing mode and educed Russia’s revolutionary past:
In theory, after shocks like this I should be six feet under. But, the way it turned out, I slowly got over this moral blow, thanks to my athletic past, my good physical health, et cetera. Is this all too much for me? No, categorically no. So what is it with me? I am not the type to take the easier or more pleasing course, to go by the satiny paved road rather than the rough footpath. I believe, and this is no empty phrase, that public activity or any other work counts for immeasurably more than personal considerations…. Look at people like the revolutionaries who died or the Decembrists [organizers of a revolt against Tsar Nicholas I in 1825] who were exiled to Siberia. What about us? Have we lost the moral capacity for selfsacrifice? [When I was Moscow first secretary] I worked from eight A.M. to midnight…. At a time of reconstruction, for three years or so everyone should work to the limit and make sacrifices. Then we will pull together and perestroika will have been given a push.47
Under terms of the political reforms agreed to in 1987–88, Soviet parliamentary bodies were to be reshaped. A new USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, with 2,250 members, was to be instituted. Two-thirds of its members were to be elected in territorial districts. One-third were to be chosen by the cartel of officially recognized and controlled associations. The CPSU filled its quota of 100 seats in a retrograde procedure: The Politburo nominated Gorbachev and ninety-nine others in a plenum of the party Central Committee on January 10, 1989, and a second plenum on March 16 approved all 100. As was barely noticed at the time, Boris Yeltsin in the January plenum cast the very first dissenting vote in the Central Committee, on any issue, since the 1920s by abstaining on support for the nomination of Yegor Ligachëv. In the vote on the nominations in March, he was one of seventy-eight committee members to vote against Ligachëv, and may have voted against other nominees of the in-group.48
As the party’s bogeyman, Yeltsin had no chance at a protected spot. He could get into the congress only by standing in one of the 1,500 geographic districts. Gorbachev chewed over entering a district race but did not, out of fear that Yeltsin would run against him and beat him.49 Gorbachev’s selfdoubt did not make the electoral Rubicon one that Yeltsin could cross lightly. Government ministers, unlike party workers, were barred from the congress. To take up a seat if elected, Yeltsin would have to leave the Gosstroi position. The congress would name a new, compact standing parliament from among its members—the old name, Supreme Soviet, stayed—and only those on the Soviet would draw salaries as legislators. If Yeltsin got into the 2,250-member congress and was not one of the 542 chosen for the Supreme Soviet, he would be without a livelihood. It did not stop him. Sentient that the decision had “ripened long ago,” in mid-December 1988 he threw his hat in the ring.50
Scouting out nomination possibilities took Yeltsin two months. Papers were filed on his behalf in fifty localities, and on February 11 he was nominated as a native son in Berezniki, traveling there by a circuitous air route through Leningrad to throw CPSU monitors off. He related his embarrassment of riches to Anatolii Luk’yanov, the Central Committee secretary with whom he had shared a dacha in 1985. Yeltsin was duty-bound, Luk’yanov said, to leave the decision to the Politburo—to which Yeltsin snorted that this was “a conversation right out of the 1930s” that he would sooner forget.51 His competitive juices raised, he took his chances by gunning for a seat in Moscow and not in the Urals. During the prescribed winnowingdown period, as the party organs tried to keep him off the ballot or shunt him to the boondocks, he pounded home his core message. “In Boris Yeltsin there is certainly more than an ounce of Huey Long,” David Remnick of The Washington Post noted; he half-expected Yeltsin to break out in song on the Louisianan’s motto, “Every Man a King.” Remnick also saw a parallel with another American icon. “When [Yeltsin] stands in front of a television camera, he will sometimes stop in midsentence, comb his thick mane of white hair, smile ironically into the lens, and then continue. Muhammad Ali used to pull the same cocky move after an easy fight.”52 On February 22, 1989, following a twelve-hour nomination meeting, the local electoral commission registered Yeltsin in National-Territorial District No. 1, Moscow’s at-large district—the most populous and the most visible in the country. He took his name off the Berezniki ballot.