In the afterglow of his cliff-hanger victory, Yeltsin moved into the Russian White House, the spanking new granite-and-marble skyscraper for the RSFSR’s legislature and executive on the Moskva River embankment, down a hill from the U.S. embassy. His cavernous office was on the fifth floor, with a private elevator, and had been occupied until then by Vitalii Vorotnikov. As parliamentary speaker, he got to form a small secretariat and to put on the payroll Aleksandr Korzhakov and irregulars from the provinces such as Valerii Bortsov, Valentina Lantseva, and the UPI speech writers, some of whom had lived out of suitcases and put themselves up in hotels, suburban hostels, and even railway stations.22 He asked Viktor Ilyushin, an apparatchik from Sverdlovsk oblast who had also worked with him in the Moscow party committee, to head the group. Under the revised RSFSR constitution, Yeltsin was to nominate candidates for head of government. On June 15, 1990, Ivan Silayev, formerly one of Ryzhkov’s deputy premiers and before that the head of the Soviet aviation industry, was confirmed as the first of his prime ministers. He and Yeltsin nominated ministers for the cabinet and secured parliamentary confirmation for them. Mikhail Bocharov, Yeltsin’s deputy in the USSR legislative committee and the point man for his election as chairman of the Russian parliament, had been led to believe the job would be his. Bocharov had been an active member of the Interregional group and finished sixth in the contest to elect its five co-chairmen. He was the principal liaison between Democratic Russia and the first session of the Russian congress, applying himself to this work while Yeltsin was out of Moscow on vacation. He says Yeltsin at first invited him to be prime minister, but was miffed when he drew up a list of cabinet members. Bocharov adds that at one point Yeltsin suggested that he himself become prime minister and Bocharov chair the parliament. Bocharov turned into a caustic critic, the first of many office seekers to become embittered.23
The triumph, and the conservative drift within the party, also affected Yeltsin’s withdrawal from the communist fraternity. The Russian Communist Party elected Polozkov—the paleo-communist out of central casting—its first secretary on June 19. Yeltsin’s man Oleg Lobov, a political centrist, finished second in the balloting. Lobov, who had moved from Sverdlovsk to Moscow in 1987, had been sent to Armenia in 1989 as CPSU second secretary and was not an official delegate to the Russian party congress. Had he been better prepared and won, Yeltsin might have tried to work out an accommodation.24 Yeltsin had indicated that if chosen as leader of the Russian congress he would ensure evenhandedness by quitting the party or putting his membership in abeyance. At the Twenty-Eighth CPSU Congress in early July, he called for the party’s conversion into a Party of Democratic Socialism or Union of Democratic Forces that would take its place in a multiparty democracy. Yeltsin wagged a finger at those unable to part with the “apparatus party” of yesteryear: “Let those who would think of any other variant look at the fate of the communist parties of the countries of Eastern Europe. They cut themselves off from the people, misunderstood their role, and found themselves left behind.”25
Gorbachev would not take the bait. Expecting deadlock, Yeltsin had bargained with Gavriil Popov and the Moscow liberals over a collective goingaway letter—in the woods outside Popov’s dacha, to block KGB snooping.26 But as usual he did things his way. He “wore out his speech writers” in drafting and redrafting his remarks and went over “all the details of the definitive moment—how he would mount the rostrum, how he would leave the hall after his statement, which doorway he would use.”27 On July 12 he asked Gorbachev to let him speak and then said to the hall that he was leaving the party. The umbilical cord was snipped after twenty-nine years. “Taking into account our transition to a multiparty society,” he said, “I cannot carry out only the decisions of the CPSU.”28 He then stalked up the center aisle of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, guffaws and whistles resounding in his ears. Soviet television broadcast the congress with a delay. When his statement began to play, Yeltsin came out of his White Office study into the corridor to watch the only large-screen set in the building. “His face was strained. He noticed no thing or person…. All that was important to him was to see himself from the side. As soon as the picture changed, he walked noiselessly to his desk—looking at no one, greeting no one, saying good-bye to no one. No doubt about it, this was one of the turning points of his life.”29 Yeltsin seems to have left his party card at the meeting hall. Family members did not see it again, and, unlike his Soviet-period medals, which he kept, it was not found with his personal effects in 2007.30
That evening Gorbachev’s guru, Anatolii Chernyayev, wrote a note to Gorbachev about Yeltsin’s “musical moment.” “You pulled teeth so as to keep the position of general secretary of the party. Yeltsin spit in its [the party’s] face and went to do what it was up to you to do.”31 Later in the congress, those leaders most at odds with Yeltsin—Yegor Ligachëv, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Vitalii Vorotnikov, and Lev Zaikov, who in 1988 had proclaimed the Yeltsin epoch to be over—were taken off the Politburo. The party as such would linger another thirteen months.
The Gorbachev group’s take on Yeltsin’s Russianism was that it was a smoke screen for his power-seeking. “All at once,” party secretary Vadim Medvedev said acridly to the Politburo in May, “he has become a Russian patriot, although he never gave a thought to Russia until now. This… is a dishonorable political game.” “Why is Yeltsin picking up this question?” Gorbachev inquired at the same session. “He is picking it up in order to play games. [He wants] to use it to make his way to power in Russia, and through Russia to blow up the CPSU and the country.”32
Although expediency was a factor, it did not make Yeltsin a political mad bomber and it was not nearly the whole story. Yeltsin was no neophyte to Russia-firstism. In Sverdlovsk he had discoursed on Russia as ugly stepchild of the Soviet Union and dreamed up paper schemes for giving it status and devolving some powers to its regions. While Russian rights had not been his priority before the 1990 election, in his first speech to the USSR congress in May 1989 he had advocated “territorial sovereignty” and “economic and financial self-reliance” for all Soviet republics, specifically endorsing a proposal from the Baltic republic of Latvia.33 By now, although the potshots from Medvedev and Gorbachev tried to obfuscate it, Russianist sentiment was quite widespread in the RSFSR elite. Partly it was contagion from nationalist movements in the Baltic and elsewhere and partly it pushed back against the Soviet congress’s decision on April 26, 1990, to put on a legal par with the fifteen “union” republics of the USSR the thirty-odd “autonomous” republics, the ethnic homelands implanted within the union republics, most of which were within Russia. “No other action could have so dramatized Yeltsin’s claim that the center ignored and repressed Russia and that Russia needed a strong leader and the right to abrogate USSR laws on Russian territory.”34 The clarion statement on the part of the RSFSR was its congress’s declaration on June 12, 1990, of Russia’s “sovereignty” (suverenitet), meaning national self-determination, territorial integrity, and, once a new Soviet constitution or federative agreement was in place, the primacy of its laws over federal legislation.35 Indicative of the breadth of feeling, the motion was first made by Vorotnikov and the communists and went through in a one-sided roll call (907 yeas, thirteen nays, nine abstentions). Yeltsin remembered the vote and the ear-splitting ovation as the acme of all his years in Moscow. “For me and for everyone… in the hall, this was a moment of rejoicing.”36 The genie was out of the bottle. Six union republics, starting with Estonia in November 1988, had adopted such a manifesto, and the remainder were to do so later in 1990 (Kirgiziya or Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia was the last, in December).