Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (12 page)

Yeltsin used his savings to buy a sturdy Moskvich car the color of an aluminum saucepan. Korzhakov tried to teach him to drive, an experience that he claimed made his hair turn grey, especially after his chief crashed into and seriously injured a motorcyclist.
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The restless Siberian had little to do in his new job and was closely monitored in case he got up to political mischief. Every morning, shifts of barely disguised KGB agents arrived to loiter in the corridor outside his office and observe who was coming in and out. His room and telephones were bugged. Lev Sukhanov called someone in Perm one day and complained about their working conditions, and a friendly KGB source told him the call to Perm had been noted and he should be careful.

The Moscow newspapers, still under party sway, were not permitted to publish anything positive about the former city boss. He went to Central Committee meetings, where he was ignored. In February the Paris newspaper
Le Monde
published Mikhail Poltoranin’s colorful account of the secret speech, including the allegation that Raisa Gorbacheva interfered with his work. Gorbachev instructed foreign ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov to tear a strip off
Le Monde
at a press briefing for publishing the fabrication. He was furious that Yeltsin himself did not refute the charge.

Gradually Yeltsin’s anguish abated. He began to go for walks alone in the street. People who recognized him stopped to smile and shake his hand. Here were the first hints that the long-apathetic masses were becoming politicized and that Yeltsin had acquired a popular base outside the party structures by giving voice to people’s resentments.

The following month it was Yegor Ligachev who overreached. When Gorbachev was on a trip abroad, the party’s number two instructed newspapers to publish a lengthy letter from a Leningrad schoolteacher, Nina Andreyevna, which defended Stalinist values and called for a halt to democratic reforms. Ligachev had sent a team to Leningrad to beef up the letter, and he pushed it as a manifesto of a new party line. No newspaper editor had the courage to refuse publication, though it was clearly a mutiny against perestroika. The country held its breath to see which way things would go.

When Gorbachev returned to Moscow, he and Alexander Yakovlev composed a lengthy response condemning the letter as an attack on his reforms and ordered the editor of
Pravda
to publish it. The reform policy was seen to be on course again, and the radicals surged back out of the trenches. Gorbachev did not dump Ligachev, but the boneheaded zealot’s influence was diminished.

In the following months newspaper editors became even more daring. Books and plays challenging communist orthodoxy began to appear. The ringing of long-silent church bells was permitted. Informal meetings at Pushkin’s statue in central Moscow were allowed so that disgruntled members of the populace could let off steam. At these ad hoc gatherings the chant of “Yeltsin! Yeltsin!” began to be heard. The former Moscow chief was becoming a lighting rod for discontent.

In his absence, the standard of living had, if anything, deteriorated. A popular anecdote described a dog praising perestroika, saying, “My chain is a little longer, the dish is further away, but I can now bark all I want.” A well-motivated but disastrous antidrinking campaign by the Politburo resulted in an acute shortage of vodka and a collapse in government revenues. Sugar became
deficit
, as it was bought up to make bootleg spirits called
samogon
. Gorbachev had promoted the crusade, declaring that communism should not be built on vodka taxes, but Ligachev took it to the point of absurdity, at one point ordering the uprooting of hundred-year-old vines in Crimea. Another anecdote described how an American and a Russian tested the echo on a mountain top. The American shouted “bourbon” and heard the word “bourbon” echo several times. The Russian called out “vodka,” and the echo came back, “Where? Where? Where?”

Yeltsin’s growing street profile and renewed self-confidence intrigued the media at home and abroad. In April Yegor Yakovlev, editor of
Moscow News
, plucked up the courage to ask Yeltsin to tell the story of how he was drugged and hauled before the Moscow party. They did the interview in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. Yakovlev suggested they take a picture of Yeltsin in his Moskvich parked outside.

In a frolicsome mood, Yeltsin posed at the wheel of the boxy automobile with Korzhakov beside him and Sukhanov in the back, then on a whim he turned the ignition key and started steering the car towards the exit. Knowing how bad a driver he was, his passengers were terrified. “He mixed up the pedals, and it was jumping around like a kangaroo,” recalled Korzhakov. “I swear to God I never felt such fright,” said Sukhanov. “We went through Manezh Square and past the Exhibition Hall. We were trying to get him to stop. He said, ‘Those who are afraid, get out!’ We were hostages to the unpredictability of our chief. He drove all the way to his apartment block. We were so nervous, our shirts were soaking wet.”
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Yegor Yakovlev was hesitant about publishing the interview in contravention of the Kremlin’s gag order. He let it appear only in the German language edition of
Moscow News
, but it still caused a stir among the Russian intelligentsia. A month later Yeltsin gave an interview to the BBC in which he called for Ligachev to be sacked and, at last, denied that he had criticized Raisa in his “secret speech.”

Yeltsin’s opportunity to be heard again in Russia came at a special Communist Party conference in June 1988—the nineteenth but the first since 1941—convened by Gorbachev to push through more new reform policies. As distinct from regular party congresses, such conferences were called only rarely to resolve urgent policy matters. In the spirit of glasnost the television cameras were allowed in. Yeltsin, a semi-outcast, was not invited but was slipped a ticket as a member of the delegation from Karelia, a region on the Finnish border, where he was admired. Arriving at the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, he found himself an object of curiosity among the 5,000 delegates, making him feel like an elephant in the zoo. He sent a written request to the platform to address the conference, but he was confined to a seat at the back of the balcony, from where no one was ever called.

On the fifth and last day, sure that he was being overlooked, Yeltsin walked down the hall staircase to the lower floor, persuaded the KGB guards to admit him, and marched to the platform holding aloft his red conference-mandate card. A delegate from Tajikistan who was speaking broke off in mid-sentence, and the hall fell silent as Yeltsin lumbered towards the rostrum, all the time staring Gorbachev in the eye. Reaching the presidium, he demanded the right to speak. Politburo members on the stage held a whispered consultation, following which Gorbachev sent Valery Boldin down to ask him quietly to go to the anteroom—he would have the floor later.

As Yeltsin began to walk back up the isle, some sympathetic delegates and journalists whispered loudly to him not to leave the hall. Realizing he might not be readmitted, he stopped and marched back to the front row and took an empty seat there. Gorbachev had little option but to call him to the microphone.

With delegates on the edge of their seats, Yeltsin began by asserting that he was proud of what socialism had achieved but there must be an analysis of the cause of the stagnation that still pervaded society. There should be no forbidden topics. The salaries and perks of the leadership should be made public. If there were shortages, everyone should feel them. This last remark drew a scattered round of applause; there were some in the hall who felt as he did. He concluded by asking for his political rehabilitation. This provoked boos and shouts. Gorbachev intervened. “Speak on, Boris Nikolayevich,” he said. “They want you to have your say. I think we should stop treating the Yeltsin case as secret.” Yeltsin responded that his only political mistake was to deliver his controversial speech at the wrong time, just before the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution, but that the party should tolerate opponents as Lenin did. He left the podium—to applause from some and hisses from others—and went outside, where he was surrounded by a crush of journalists and camera crews.

In the hall some delegates rose to pillory their impulsive comrade all over again. Yegor Ligachev indignantly uttered a line that would haunt him: “Boris, you are wrong!” Within days people in Moscow were wearing lapel buttons saying, “Yegor, you are wrong!”

As the conference was about to end, Gorbachev introduced his most farreaching domestic reform yet.
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During his closing speech he produced a piece of paper from his pocket. On it was written a resolution to amend the constitution. This would permit the creation of a new Congress of People’s Deputies of 2,250 members, of whom two-thirds would be directly elected from all across the Soviet Union and a third chosen by party-approved public bodies. It would replace the rubber-stamp Soviet parliament, which met only eight days a year without ever hearing a dissenting voice. It was a giant leap towards democracy.

Already looking at their watches and preparing to leave for the railway stations and airports, many loyal delegates raised their cards to vote for this sensational resolution without realizing what they were doing.

This was the high point of Gorbachev’s reforms, achieved by sleight of hand. He had got support from the ruling Communist Party for the first multiplecandidate elections in seven decades of Soviet rule. His scheme was a masterly combination of democracy and management. The party would automatically have a hundred seats. This meant that Gorbachev and his Politburo comrades could safely include themselves in the “red hundred” to avoid any risk of being rejected by the people. Gorbachev dared not seek popular support in an electoral district. Yeltsin’s celebrity was growing, and he might oppose Gorbachev and win.

As the election laws were being drawn up, Gorbachev moved faster to push Soviet society to break with the past. Glasnost flowered as never before. The ban on the sale of foreign newspapers was lifted. Andrey Sakharov was permitted to travel abroad. Newspaper editors published scathing accounts of mismanagement and shortages. In November Gorbachev declared that “only the democratization of our entire life can guarantee to overcome stagnation.” It was springtime for glasnost. “There is no alternative to Gorbachev,” enthused Vitaly Korotich, editor of the avant-garde magazine
Ogonyok
(Little Flame), which had become so popular it was sold out every week within hours of going on sale. “The bureaucrats who oppose him are the usual ‘fat cats,’ people with no idealism, people who believe in nothing.”
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Gorbachev’s stock rose internationally. In February 1989 the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan. U.S.-Soviet talks on nuclear disarmament gathered pace. He created the conditions for the freedom of East European countries that had been in thrall to Moscow since World War II. He made it clear that the doctrinaire communist regimes there could no longer count on Soviet tanks to prop them up. At a Foreign Ministry briefing Gerasimov called this the Frank Sinatra doctrine—they could do it their way. It led to a series of counterrevolutions throughout 1989, in which one communist regime after another in Eastern Europe was ousted. They began in Poland and spread to Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The Berlin Wall fell in November, leading to German reunification a year later.

Aware that if Yeltsin won a contested seat in the new Congress of People’s Deputies, he would have a popular mandate, the Soviet leader set a trap for his most strident critic. He fixed the rules so that government ministers could only stand for election if they resigned their posts. If his tormentor did run, and if he were defeated, he would be out of a job.

Yeltsin did decide to run when the election was called for March 26, 1989. He put his name forward as a candidate in Moscow’s District Number 1, a constituency encompassing the whole city. The Politburo agreed to the novel proposal of holding a “selection meeting” at which 1,000 party members would choose two out of three prospective candidates to represent the capital. Of the party members given permission to take part, 800 were, by Yeltsin’s reckoning, carefully chosen as obedient, brainwashed card-carriers, who had been instructed to favor Yury Brakov, general manager of the Zil plant. After a meeting that went on until 3 a.m., Yeltsin was nominated with more than 50 percent support, and Brakov came second. The card carriers were not so obedient after all.

His vigor restored, Yeltsin raced around Moscow to crowded election rallies, capitalizing on his underdog status to whip up support. He advocated ending party privileges and allowing people to decide issues by referendum. The party inadvertently added to his mystique by instructing editors to ignore his campaign. A more effective telegraph agency was at work on his behalf: the rumor circuit, which for decades had been the conduit for hard news in the Soviet capital. When a worried Gorbachev approved a Politburo commission to censure Yeltsin for antiparty activities, tens of thousands of outraged voters poured into the streets for the biggest unsanctioned public gathering in Moscow since the Revolution, and the idea was quickly dropped.

Having set democracy and glasnost in motion, Gorbachev had to agree to allow a debate on state television between Yeltsin and Brakov, representing the progressive and conservative wings of the Communist Party respectively. The evening it was shown, millions tuned in to watch. But not everything was above board. The “ordinary citizens” who allegedly telephoned the studio and whose questions were passed on to the candidates were set up. The man who supposedly posed the most hostile question to Yeltsin told reporters next day that he was unaware his name had been used. “Tell Yeltsin not to worry,” he said. “I’m going to vote for him anyway.”
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