The opening of the RSFSR’s books was salt on the wounds of Russian rancor over the economic terms of Soviet federalism. Prime Minister Silayev persuaded himself that the center had for seven decades been robbing Russia blind. He was scandalized to find that the RSFSR subsidized the federal budget to the tune of 46 billion rubles (about $30 billion at the official exchange rate). With Yeltsin’s backing, he tried to pare the figure in the 1991 budget to 10 billion rubles and to pass that sum to sister republics through an RSFSR-controlled account and collect some of what was owing in kind as consumer goods.37 As talk grew of market pricing, Russia’s mammoth reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals looked increasingly like a pot of gold to be protected from the center and from poorer Soviet republics. And Yeltsin voiced sympathy with the labor movement that had taken shape in Russian and Ukrainian heavy industry in 1989 and gone on strike in favor of workers’ control over productive assets.
Crisscrossing the regions of Russia for three weeks in August 1990—flying on scheduled Aeroflot flights—Yeltsin was in tip-top populist form. In Sterlitamak, Bashkiriya, in the southern Urals, an invitation-only audience gathered in the House of Culture of the Caustic Soda Works:
Watching Yeltsin’s chemistry with a crowd, it is easy to see why local officials are eager to grab his coattails…. Yeltsin had just begun his remarks when an aide interrupted to tell him that the outdoor loudspeakers were not working and that the thousands of people gathered in the square outside were getting restless.
A few minutes later, Yeltsin left the elite stewing in the stuffy auditorium and squeezed through a window onto a low rooftop. The reception was thunderous. He doffed his suit coat and mugged for the delighted crowd until technicians could run a microphone out to him.
“Well, I think this event could have been better organized,” he teased, with a glance back at his embarrassed hosts.38
At several stops, Yeltsin was mobbed by well-wishers and had to step onto a streetcar or truck bed to get out of the press of people. In the hamlet of Raifa outside Kazan, Tatariya, where he had lived for five years before the war, he went for a half-hour swim in the local lake and then donated his striped swimsuit to his hosts, who made it the centerpiece of “one of the main legends of the village,” brought out for discussion once a year.39
In the minority homelands, Yeltsin catered to the anti-Moscow mood. If he were a Tatar, he told writers in Kazan, he would be going after “the self-sufficiency of the Tatar republic.” At Kazan State University on August 5, where he was met with pickets who bore signs reading Azatlyk (Freedom, in the Tatar language), he put forth his famous summons to the Tatars to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.” In Ufa, the capital of Bashkiriya, he rephrased the calclass="underline" “We say to the Bashkir people: ‘You take the share of power which you yourselves can swallow!’”40 The catchy phrase was minted by his new adviser on nationality questions, the ethnographer and sociologist Galina Starovoitova. It corresponded with Yeltsin’s take on the issue, and he unsheathed it to great effect. On the same expedition, he deplored the cost to Russians of the USSR as a superpower. “Charity begins at home,” he declared, “and Russia will not help other states” or keep up the Soviet Union’s defense, space, and foreign-aid budgets.41
Russia-USSR tensions were taken to the boiling point in 1990–91 not by this or that issue but by the intertwining of all the main issues dividing them. For the insurgent Yeltsin, devolution of power was a precondition of pursuing political and economic reform. He meant to become Russia’s first elected head of state and up the pace of economic change, toward a terminus he now would not put in the Marxist compartments: “I think you find in the real world neither the capitalism about which the classics spoke nor the socialism about which they spoke…. I am not for socialism for the sake of socialism. I am for the people living better.”42 The prelude to market reform would be an anti-crisis package to counter shortages and hoarding. And Russia would need to be paid a fair price by Soviet and foreign purchasers for its fuels and raw materials. Only self-direction would permit his government to take this route.
Gorbachev was more emphatic than Yeltsin in commingling devolution, politics, and economics. The play for sovereignty, he charged in May 1990, was a design for killing state socialism (communism) as an ideology and social model. “It contains an attempt to excommunicate Russia from socialism…. The program’s author… wants to invite us with one stroke of the pen to say farewell to the socialist choice we made in 1917.”43 In defending the central power, Gorbachev saw himself as carrying on sacrosanct Soviet beliefs as much as constitutional stability.
Did this all make for an ineluctable collision between the two? High-level actors feared it did and tried to talk Gorbachev into co-opting Yeltsin by offering him a plum political position. Aleksandr Yakovlev and Georgii Shakhnazarov—who had earlier begged Gorbachev to send Yeltsin abroad—lobbied him after the Russian election to make Yeltsin vice president of the USSR. Gorbachev demurred, saying Yeltsin’s ambitiousness was too insatiable for him ever to accept.44 In December 1990 he handed the post to Gennadii Yanayev, a former Komsomol official whom he said he could trust; Yanayev would be one of the leaders of the plot to depose him in August 1991. While Yeltsin would have turned down the vice presidency—it would lower him to “personal assistant to Gorbachev,” he said in an interview—he would have considered the meatier job of prime minister if it had been offered in 1989. Once he was RSFSR leader, it was out of the question.45
Common ground was more likely to be found on policy than on the allocation of positions. Yeltsin’s ideas about economic and socioeconomic change continued to be sketchy. For some months in 1990, he backed a wacky plan, put forward by economic counselors Igor Nit and Pavel Medvedev, for motivating workers through the emission of a counter-currency they termed “red money.” Implementation in the agrarian sector divided the Silayev cabinet, and a more presentable alternative came up. The Five Hundred Days Program for economic reform furnished the last best chance for collaboration with the center. Drawn up between February and August of 1990 by a group of economists headed by Stanislav Shatalin and Yevgenii Yasin of Gorbachev’s camp and Grigorii Yavlinskii of Yeltsin’s, it called on Russia and the Soviet Union to move decisively to market harmonization of economic activity. In the space of a year and a half, it would have nullified most price controls, made a start on privatization of property (for which it used the euphemism “destatization”), scrapped the USSR’s industrial ministries, and relegated regulatory and overhead functions to an “interrepublic economic committee,” after agreement on a “treaty of economic union.” The project, Yeltsin assured crowds in the Volga basin and the Urals in August, would stabilize the economy in two years and lead to growth and improved consumer welfare in the third year. The Russian Supreme Soviet passed on it on September 11, at which point Gorbachev got cold feet. On October 16 he abandoned Five Hundred Days, saying it would emasculate the federal government. Yeltsin declared Russia would have to make reform on its own, which Kremlin conservatives took as evidence that it was impossible ever to cooperate with him.46 Yavlinskii left his position as deputy premier of the RSFSR in frustration with Gorbachev but also with Yeltsin. Yeltsin was to vow in a private aside to Yelena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov’s widow, that “I will not play the dupe [durachkom ne budu] the next time.”47