Yeltsin: A Life

Another barrage of flak was fairer to link to Yeltsin’s behavior. About ten P.M. on September 28, 1989, he showed up drenched and bruised at the guardhouse of the Uspenskoye dacha compound for VIPs, on the Moskva River west of Moscow. He informed police that he had been forced to swim for his life after a carful of thugs waylaid him and dumped him off a bridge with a sack over his head. Yeltsin had been driven from a political rally in Ramenki, the Moscow neighborhood he represented in the city council, bearing two bouquets he took from the meeting, to the dacha of Sergei Bashilov, another construction bureaucrat from Sverdlovsk, with whom he was social. (He had known Bashilov, Yurii Batalin’s predecessor as chairman of Gosstroi, since the 1960s.) Aleksandr Korzhakov, called in by the family, went to the guardhouse, gave Yeltsin a shot of vodka, and took him home. Yeltsin’s purpose in going to Uspenskoye is unclear, as the Bashilovs were not home and their steambath room was locked. Press speculation centered on a tryst, although there is no proof of that and womanizing is a charge his enemies have almost never aimed at him. Speaking the day after to the Soviet interior minister, Vadim Bakatin, he retracted his statement about a plot to drown him. Today Bakatin, in retirement, says Yeltsin was doused in a pond near the dacha (by whom or for what he will not say) and what ensued was a KGB caper to embarrass him.¹⁰³

If that was the plan, it misfired. Bakatin and Gorbachev reported to the Supreme Soviet that the reasons for the incident were not known and that there had been no attempt to murder Yeltsin, and Yeltsin issued a statement fulminating at infringement on his “private life.” Yeltsin called off several public appearances, and some of his amateur helpers, fearing he was losing his touch, had “nervous eruptions verging on frenzy.”¹⁰⁴ But nerves calmed, and the uproar blew over. Korzhakov offered to be his full-time security man and chaperone, to prevent further misadventures. Yeltsin soon perked up and was back on track.¹⁰⁵ Greener pastures beckoned.

CHAPTER EIGHT Birth of a Nation

Gorbachev’s decision to begin political reform with his central government had a prodigious effect on the course of change. Because the society beneath was ever more restive—“moving to the left,” as Yeltsin put it, using “left” to mean hunger for change rather than in the socialist-capitalist dimension—and because curbs on contestation were breaking down, the next wave of change, in the fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union and their provincial and local governments, was predestined to be more radical. Boris Yeltsin was checkmated at the USSR level. The Interregional Deputies Group was a minority in the Soviet congress, and he was not its unchallenged leader. With good reason, he felt he was in better sync than his adversaries, and even than his allies, with the times and with a popular constituency. Power and principle conjoined on a strategy of outflanking the general secretary and away from the moderation that had characterized Yeltsin’s views when he first took up the reform banner. It was “a classic polarizing game” intended to box Gorbachev in “and to create the conditions for a decisive break with the old order.”¹

Several members of the 1989 campaign team wanted Yeltsin to catch the coming political wave in Moscow. There he would have taken control of city hall and revenge on the local party machine. Yeltsin decided to train his sights on Russia. It was against Soviet law to sit in more than two elected legislatures. Yeltsin thus had to choose between Moscow and the RSFSR, unless he wanted first to resign his seat in the USSR Supreme Soviet. It was not a hard choice. “This maximal program” of going for Russia, wrote Lev Sukhanov, “was more to Yeltsin’s taste. He does not like to take the same track twice: monotony nauseates him.”² The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was a much grander prize than Moscow. It accounted for half of the Soviet Union’s population, two-thirds of its economy, and three-quarters of its landmass. The RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies was to be elected on March 4, 1990, under rules eased up from the USSR election: The filters for candidates were simplified, and there were no seats earmarked for the CPSU or other organizations.

Yeltsin sought nomination in his home province and was registered in District No. 74, comprising Sverdlovsk city and the industrial town of Pervoural’sk. His return to Sverdlovsk in the last days of January was front-page news, despite moves by the CPSU obkom, now headed by his old enemy Leonid Bobykin, to hush it up. “He met with electors in halls filled to bursting. Whenever possible, an audio feed onto the street was organized.”³ At one rally, three social scientists from the Urals Polytechnic Institute—Aleksandr Il’in, Gennadii Kharin, and Lyudmila Pikhoya—walked up to Yeltsin and told him his statement had been haphazard and he was too dependent on Q&A repartee. They offered to write a sample speech with greater thematic richness. Yeltsin liked the result and asked them to draft his candidate’s program in February.⁴

For half of the campaign, Yeltsin was on the stump for candidates outside of Sverdlovsk oblast. The lion’s share of them subscribed to Democratic Russia, a protoparty formed in January 1990 on the basis of the Interregional caucus, which listed nominees in several hundred urbanized districts. Yeltsin offered his signature on leaflets and posters, “creating a giant coattails effect from Boris Yeltsin on down to the city district level.”⁵ Russia was the only Soviet republic where the CPSU was without a committee, bureau, and first secretary. Reluctantly, Gorbachev in October 1989 reconstituted the Khrushchev-era Russian Bureau within the Central Committee apparatus. He accepted a Russian Communist Party only in the new year. It did not have its founding congress until June of 1990, three months after the election. So it was that the Communist Party was hit-or-miss in the RSFSR campaign and candidates who were members of it (as 70 percent were) were left to sink or swim. Vitalii Vorotnikov, the Politburo member who answered for the RSFSR, met with yawns when he tried to get Gorbachev to send heavy hitters into the fray. He offered his resignation to Gorbachev in January, and then agreed to stay through the election.⁶

The Yeltsin campaign offered a mélange of the familiar and the new. In pushing populism and calling for a blanket prohibition on nomenklatura privilege, he was aided by publication in February of the best-selling Confession on an Assigned Theme, with its purple prose about the lifestyles of the CPSU elite. It was widely quoted in the provincial press.⁷ The new ingredients had to do mostly with the governance of Russia and its place in a reformed federal system. Here Yeltsin preached making the RSFSR over into a “presidential republic” with an elective president, a full-time parliament, a constitutional court, a state bank, an academy of sciences, a territorial militia, and multiple political parties. A democratic constitution adopted by referendum would enshrine these provisions as well as “the principle of the paramountcy of law” and freedoms of expression, assembly, association, and worship. The Soviet state, de jure federal but de facto unitary, ought to be decentralized, Yeltsin’s program said, “because monopoly and the overcentralization of political and economic power have led our country to its present state.” The heavy hand of Moscow stultified natural communities of interest as surely as dictatorship stultified political freedom and command planning stultified economic enterprise. “We have to give the maximum possible self-reliance [or self-rule—samostoyatel’nost’] to the republics,” beginning with the RSFSR. “We have to see to it that we have strong republics, which should decide themselves what functions to give up to [the center] and which to keep for them.”⁸ The same held within Russia, where regions had to have more autonomy. Devolution, based on liberal, nonethnic Russian nationalism, augmented democratization and market reform as a third and equal strand in Yeltsin’s de-monopolization project. How the wish would be made reality, or what would happen if the strands came into conflict or were internally inconsistent, was not specified.⁹