Even his detractors, Tret’yakov continued, “never tire of reiterating his positive features,” and Yeltsin came across as “contradictory but likeable in a human way even in his gaffes and inconsistencies.” Most important were the mass perceptions of the gravitas that accrued to Yeltsin from his background in the governing elite:
A hallmark of the Yeltsin phenomenon is his relations with the apparatus. This phenomenon could have sprung up only inside the apparatus because until now the apparatus has been the real and stable part of power, and people need stability. But the stability and strength of officialdom annoy people and restrict their freedom. Therefore, their sympathies go to the one who shakes up this apparatus. However, so far any serious revamping of the apparatus will be feasible only if it comes from someone who himself constitutes part of it and is thence a credible force. The circle closes and the Yeltsin phenomenon moves in this circle. I am sure that, had Yeltsin run for the post of director of some research institute or factory, his success could not have been guaranteed. On March 26, 1989, Yeltsin was voted in by a lopsided majority not as “boss for the people” but as “boss for the bosses.” The oneness in voting for Yeltsin is the people’s retort to the apparatus for its high-handed omnipotence.
Tret’yakov prognosticated that the groundswell would persist as long as the regime showed itself incapable of making improvements. “Even Yeltsin’s failures will be blamed not on him but on the [Soviet] administrative-command system and on his critics.”62
Three days after gaining his seat, Yeltsin set out for a month-long vacation in Kislovodsk, in the North Caucasus. The decision removed him from the runoff stage, where some pro-reform nominees needed help. It struck some as eccentric. Aleksandr Muzykantskii also detected that Yeltsin wanted other players to make do without him for a time, and so to feel the need to approach him with offers of cooperation on his, the winner’s, terms.63 Back from Kislovodsk, Yeltsin orated at rallies in the Moscow suburb of Zelenograd and in front of the Luzhniki stadium.
From the first day of operations of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, May 25, 1989, it was to be a little more than two years until the life-and-death crisis of the Soviet regime. Most of this caesura Yeltsin spent either in unproductive legislative activity or in campaigning for office. Time and initiative were on his side because he had the ace in the hole—people power—that other contestants did not have.
The congress’s organizing parley, televised live, showed the difficulty of translating charisma into institutional influence. High on the docket was selection of a chairman of the Supreme Soviet. It would be the cardinal office in the Soviet state, and Gorbachev meant to have it. In a conversation with Yeltsin in mid-May about their plans, Gorbachev offered him a ministerial post; Yeltsin refused and said, “Everything will be decided by the congress.” At a Politburo meeting days after that, Gorbachev instructed aides to offer Yeltsin the position of first deputy premier of the RSFSR and to craft an “intermediate response” to questions about Yeltsin’s dependability.64 The offer seems not to have been made. Yeltsin abstained on the motion at the May Central Committee plenum to nominate Gorbachev for the chairmanship—the only member to do so—and then declared he would vote for it in the congress because he was bound by party discipline. The Soviet Union, he said, was in a “revolutionary situation” which the party did not seem capable of facing.65 At the congress, he behaved coquettishly. He said in his maiden speech on May 26 that he was jobless as of the day before and might possibly agree to “some kind of nomination.” That night a Yeltsin representative consented to the urging of deputies from Sverdlovsk that his name be offered from the floor. Aleksandr Obolenskii, a little-known engineer from Leningrad, said he would do it—only to flipflop and nominate himself. Yeltsin distanced himself from the attempt, and 96 percent of the deputies voted on May 27 to elect Gorbachev.66
After this comedy of errors came a more pressing problem: Yeltsin having given up his Gosstroi post, unfriendly deputies blocked him from so much as a seat in the Supreme Soviet. Of the twelve deputies nominated for the RSFSR’s eleven seats in the Council of Nationalities (the section of the Supreme Soviet for which Yeltsin was eligible), he finished dead last in the congressional voting, his 5 million popular votes notwithstanding. The day was saved by Gavriil Popov, the Moscow economic thinker whom Yeltsin had cold-shouldered in 1987. He sold Gorbachev on a resolution. Aleksei Kazannik, a jurist from Omsk, Siberia, freed up a seat for him, and the congress on May 29 approved. Gorbachev wanted a vote on whether Yeltsin would fill the vacancy. Kazannik would not budge on the package deal and received more than 100,000 congratulatory telegrams.67 In his first speech to the congress on May 31, Yeltsin called for a yearly country-wide referendum on confidence in the chairman of parliament and for conversion of the Kremlin medical directorate into a service for mothers and children.
When the Supreme Soviet met in June, Yeltsin, with Gorbachev again in acquiescence, was made chairman of its committee on construction and architecture.68 It was a dead end, Gorbachev seemed to think, and it tied Yeltsin to housekeeping matters more than to politics. Yeltsin did not disagree and invested little in the position. Its real utility was visibility and the midtown workspace and telephones put at the disposal of Lev Sukhanov, now his paid parliamentary assistant, and volunteers. Yeltsin said in October 1989 he was thinking of giving up the committee because it had no staff and pulled him into citizen petitions and bureaucratic red tape.69 As lawmaker, he was listless. He introduced no bills and did not affect policy. He built his everyman image by signing himself out of the Kremlin health clinic and into City Polyclinic No. 5. Naina Yeltsina did her part by shopping in neighborhood grocery stores not reserved for the elite. Vladimir Mezentsev, a press aide to Yeltsin in 1989–90 and a critic ever since, had the sense that she did all her shopping in such places. “I was a bachelor at the time, and Naina Iosifovna constantly gave me advice on the shops where sausages would be available.”70 During his campaign for Russian president in 1991, Yeltsin was able to advertise that she “spends three to four hours a day chasing around shops, like all the other unfortunate Moscow women.”71
What should not be missed in all this is that Yeltsin’s year in the last Soviet parliament extended his horizons in more ways than one. The catalyst was the Interregional Deputies Group (MDG), the pioneering democratic caucus, with about 250 members, formed against Gorbachev’s wishes on July 29–30, 1989. The conscience of the group was Andrei Sakharov, the erudite atomic physicist, advocate of human rights, and Nobel laureate who had been freed from house arrest in 1986; its arranger was Gavriil Popov.
During the spring campaign, Sakharov acceded to Yeltsin’s request to stay out of District No. 1, but considered him to be “of a completely different [lesser] caliber than Gorbachev,” and bumptious at that.72 His attitude eased after the election, as he came to know Yeltsin and to see how much he had changed. “I don’t understand how Yeltsin arrives at his decisions,” Sakharov said to an American friend in the autumn, “but he usually arrives at the right answer.”73
As formation of the Interregional group was being discussed, some of the founders wanted Yeltsin excluded as an ex-partocrat and a rabble rouser. Yeltsin wanted not just to join but to be sole leader. That was fine with Popov. At the organizing meeting, in the Moscow Cinema House, he and a petroleum engineer from Orenburg named Vladislav Shapovalenko put forward Yeltsin as chairman. Sergei Stankevich said he could support Yeltsin if his position were open to review after one year. Yurii Boldyrev, an engineer elected in a district in Leningrad, led a countercharge: “If you want to create a centralized party, go right ahead and create one. I will not participate. We will not fall in behind a leader.” Viktor Pal’m, an Estonian natural scientist, said choosing Yeltsin or anyone else as boss would be “a fatal mistake.” Effective leaders “are not appointed or elected” but “come into being” in the course of solving collective problems. Pal’m proposed the designation of equal co-chairmen. Popov agreed, and five were elected: Yeltsin (first, with 144 votes), historian Yurii Afanas’ev (143 votes), Popov (132 votes), Pal’m (73 votes), and Sakharov (69 votes). Popov and Shapovalenko then tried to have one among the quintet made the “main” chairman, or to have the position rotate.74 It was a fool’s errand. Yeltsin, Afanas’ev stated, was “the second figure after Gorbachev on the country’s political stage,” but the Interregional group could not be a one-man band. The result was not pleasing to Yeltsin. “A USSR-wide opposition party or movement could at that time only have been a leader-centered one, and the only leader capable of heading it was Yeltsin. But the role the Interregionals were willing to assign, which was not even first among equals but equal to four other leaders, could not have been attractive to him. The MDG showed it was not prepared to be building material for a political organization that would smooth Yeltsin’s road to power.”75