March 4 brought another electoral landslide. Yeltsin toted up 84 percent of the votes in his Sverdlovsk district against eleven no-name candidates. He told a journalist friend he would now “go only to Golgotha”—to a reckoning in some form with the old regime. The look on his face was both elated and fearful.10
Gorbachev hurried to prop up his position by carpentering a new institutional framework for governing the Soviet Union. In early February he had the party Central Committee approve a motion to repeal Article 6 of the 1977 Brezhnev constitution, which stipulated that the CPSU was the only legal party—“the leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system.” It was an overdue concession to the opposition and to democratic principles. On March 13, 1990, the USSR congress approved the measure. At the same sitting, on March 14, it introduced a Soviet presidency, to which it elected Gorbachev on March 19. The change was an acknowledgment that the Communist Party, whose general secretary he remained, was no longer plausible as the sole basis for political authority. At the Politburo session of March 7, Anatolii Luk’yanov, who was to succeed Gorbachev as USSR parliamentary chairman, asked him why they were acting in such unseemly haste. “So as to put them [the republics and the Russian democrats] in their place,” Gorbachev rejoined. Luk’yanov predicted, accurately, that the republics would counterpunch with presidencies of their own. He then brought up a deadlier point—about legitimacy. Why should Gorbachev be made president by the legislature and not by the whole people? “Why should the people not be the electors? This betokens mistrust of the people. All this will be exaggerated by [the opposition].” Gorbachev was unswayed, a blunder of biblical proportions.11 Until June–July 1990, when Yeltsin streaked past him in the opinion polls, he would have won a general election.12
A couple of weeks after the election, Yeltsin, as Gorbachev noted with satisfaction at a Politburo meeting, requested and received a spa ticket from the Soviet parliament; he had notified Luk’yanov that he was worn to the bone and had to get away. The effort to make Yeltsin speaker of the RSFSR congress, which was to open in May, would have to begin without him.13 Once he was back from vacation, however, Yeltsin worked methodically on getting the position and agreed to put off formation of the Russian presidency until 1991. On the question of chairing the legislature, about 40 percent of the deputies were pro-Yeltsin (in the USSR congress, only 10 to 15 percent by this time adhered to the Interregional group) and 40 percent were anti-Yeltsin; the rest were known as the “swamp.” Hopeful of success, the Democratic Russia bloc nominated Yeltsin for the chair.
In camera, Nikolai Ryzhkov from Sverdlovsk, who was still Gorbachev’s prime minister, had a foreboding at the Politburo meeting of March 22, 1990, of a domino effect if Yeltsin and his allies were to succeed in their quest: “If they take Russia, they need not try hard to destroy the [Soviet] Union and cast off the central leadership: party and legislative and governmental. In my view, once they have taken Russia, everything else, the entire federal superstructure, will very quickly go to pieces.”14 The inhabitants of what had been an impregnable castle were pressing the panic button, this at a time when many analysts still asserted that Russia could never be a threat to Soviet stability. Bootlessly, Ryzhkov pushed the Politburo to nominate and promote a reliable candidate for Russian parliamentary chairman. At the April 20 meeting of the Politburo, Gorbachev expressed incredulity at Yeltsin’s growing standing in Russian society. “What Yeltsin is doing is incomprehensible…. Every Monday his face doubles in size [due to his selfimportance]. He speaks inarticulately, he often comes up with the devil knows what, he is like a worn-out record. But the people repeat over and over, ‘He is our man!’”15 Gorbachev could not understand why and could not bring himself to imitate Yeltsin.
On April 27 Yeltsin flew to London for a foreign diversion, the British book party for the English translation (as Against the Grain) of Confession on an Assigned Theme. Margaret Thatcher received him for forty-five minutes at 10 Downing Street. He tried to draw her out on a channel between the United Kingdom and “the new, free Russia” that would bypass the Soviet government. First, she replied suavely, Russia would need to be new and free in more than words. The Iron Lady had notified Gorbachev “to make it clear that I was receiving Mr Yeltsin in the way I would a Leader of the Opposition.” She found her guest “far more my idea of the typical Russian than was Mr Gorbachev—tall, burly, square Slavic face and shock of white hair.” He was sure-footed and mannerly, “with a smile full of good humour and a touch of self-mockery.” What most struck her was that Yeltsin “had… thought through some of the fundamental problems much more clearly than had Mr Gorbachev” and, “unlike President Gorbachev, had broken out of the communist mindset and language.” Thatcher shared her rave reviews with President Bush, who answered that “the Americans did not share them.”16
Yeltsin left the next day to give a talk at a symposium in Córdoba, Spain. The six-passenger airplane chartered to take him from there to Barcelona ran into engine and electrical trouble and had to make a rough landing at the Córdoba airport. Yeltsin suffered a slipped disk and numbness in his legs and feet. He had three hours of spinal surgery in Barcelona on April 30. Within two days, he was on his feet; on May 5 he was in Moscow, met at the airport by a crowd chanting “Yeltsin for President!” Never one to baby an injury, he made it on May 7 to a pre-congress meeting of reform-minded deputies in Priozersk, a lakeside resort near Leningrad. He and Lev Sukhanov sat in a pavilion and downed a liter of Armenian brandy, his preferred drink at that time—before repairing to the main party for toasts.17 If Yeltsin had been operated on in a Soviet hospital, he would have been bed-bound for weeks and might well have lost the contest for Russian parliamentary chief on that account.
Only on May 16 did Gorbachev nominate Aleksandr Vlasov, a lackluster apparatchik recently promoted to Vorotnikov’s place as head of the RSFSR government, as congress chairman. Gorbachev spoke on Vlasov’s behalf on May 23 and dropped the ball, packing his bags for a visit to Canada and the United States. He and the Central Committee men sent to twist the deputies’ arms could not conceive of losing—“as Nicholas II might have thought on the eve of the revolution,” to quote Georgii Shakhnazarov.18 But, straw polls showing his support to be soft, Vlasov backed out and left Yeltsin to face Ivan Polozkov, a regional secretary from Krasnodar in the North Caucasus similar in mentality to Ligachëv—but to Gorbachev more appetizing than Yeltsin.
A lot was riding on Yeltsin’s May 25 opening speech to the deputies. He and his team put the finishing touches on it past midnight. Discovering at daybreak that the ribbon from the office typewriter on which they had worked was missing, they were anxious that one of his opponents might read it and steal a march on Yeltsin, “and then there would be nothing for him to do on the podium.”19 It was a false alarm. Deputies made their way from the Rossiya Hotel to the Kremlin gates through lines of picketers bearing Yeltsin signs. In his self-introduction, Yeltsin conceded that attitudes toward him among the representatives ran the full gamut, and pledged “dialogue with various political forces” and give-and-take with Gorbachev. In the first round of voting, tabulated the morning of May 26, he polled 497 votes to Polozkov’s 473. On May 27 he tiptoed up to 503 votes, Polozkov drooping to 458. On Tuesday, May 29, with Vlasov back in the game, Yeltsin sat breathless through a third round. He squeaked through with 535 votes, outpolling Vlasov by sixty-eight and landing exactly four more than the compulsory 50-percent-plus-one.20 Gorbachev heard the ill tidings midway across the Atlantic to Ottawa. He said in retirement that he might have been better off egging the deputies on to vote for Yeltsin, which would have motivated contrarians to vote against him: “They wanted to show their independence.”21 Independence from established authority was indeed the zeitgeist in 1990, and Yeltsin was channeling it.