Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

At an emergency Politburo meeting the following day Gorbachev lambasted “the complete helplessness of the Defense Ministry” and accused senior generals of being “apprehensive” of perestroika. Turning to the defense minister, Marshal Sergei Sokolov, he said, “Under the present circumstances, if I were you, I would resign at once.” 163Sokolov stood at attention and resigned on the spot. More than 150 lower-ranking officers were dismissed or disciplined for “negligence.”

To add insult to injury, Gorbachev selected a relatively unknown general, Dmitri Yazov, as his new minister of defense, passing over dozens of more senior officers. The military hierarchy deeply resented being singled out for such degrading treatment and the accompanying barrage of criticism in the Soviet media but could do nothing. As Akhromeyev acknowledged in his memoirs, its guilt was “undeniable.”

The Rust incident was widely interpreted as a sign of Gorbachev’s political dominance. However, it turned out to be one of the last occasions that the general secretary was able to impose his will on a united Politburo. Opposition to his policies was growing within the leadership, from both left and right. The battle for perestroika had just begun.

As A REVOLUTIONARY ELITE, committed to building a utopian society by force, the Communists understood that they would always be a minority. In order to impose their views on the majority and stay in power, they had to stick together. If cracks were allowed to appear in the Communist monolith, the party would lose its aura of historical infallibility. The entire system would rapidly fall apart. That was why there was no greater crime in the Bolshevik lexicon than “factionalism.” The traitor within was more dangerous than the enemy without.

The “unshakable unity” of the Communist movement was of course a myth. The East European Communist parties, particularly the Polish party, were riven by internal struggles. The Soviet party accommodated hardline Stalinists, social democrats, and careerists without any ideology at all. The doctrine of democratic centralism permitted party members to express their opinions freely—at least in theory—provided they abided by the decisions of “higher authorities.” What was banned was organized opposition to the “party line,” as promulgated by the leadership. This included the creation of factions within the party or—an even bigger heresy—any attempt to influence the internal debate by appealing to public opinion. The men who waved to the crowds from the top of the Lenin Mausoleum were expected to speak with a single voice and abide by a single code of behavior.

The iron conventions of Communist Party politics were to be shattered by a Siberian named Boris Yeltsin. Constructed like a human bulldozer with very poor brakes, he was accustomed to pushing aside any obstacle that lay in his path. Six feet four inches tall, with a pugnacious face and a mane of white hair, he had an almost animal sense of power and territory. Hardworking, stubborn, independent, self-confident to a fault, he was what the Russians call a nastoiashchii nachalnik (a real boss). His leadership abilities propelled him upward, from running a construction site in the Ural Mountains to regional party secretary to the Politburo in Moscow.

“For more than thirty years now, I have been a boss,” he writes in his memoirs. “That’s exactly what people of my social class in Russia are called. Not a bureaucrat, not an official, not a director, but a boss. I can’t stand the word—there’s something about it that smacks of the chain gang. But what can you do? Perhaps being first was always a part of my nature, but I just didn’t realize it in my early years.” 164

In addition to being a natural leader, Yeltsin was a born rebel. As a child he was always getting into scrapes. His boxer’s nose, which is broken in the middle, was the result of a childhood fight with older boys, when he was whacked across the face with the shaft of a cart. A few years later, during the war, he stole a hand grenade from the ammunition store. It exploded while he was attempting to dismantle it, blowing off two fingers of his left hand.

The young Boris had an ingrained disdain for authority figures. He was expelled from school at the age of twelve after publicly accusing the head teacher of abusing the children “mentally and psychologically.” 165It was a drama that repeated itself over and over again, as he made his way from a remote Siberian village to the corridors of Kremlin power. He got into arguments with university professors, construction foremen, plant directors, party secretaries. The plot and cast of supporting characters changed, but the climactic scene always remained the same: a furious denunciation of a powerful—and, in Yeltsin’s eyes, unworthy—superior.

It was this combination of leader and rebel that made Yeltsin such a formidable opponent. If he could not climb to the top of the Communist Olympus, he would destroy the party from within. With his intimate knowledge of nomenklatura politics and his skill at exposing the party’s internal divisions, he was more dangerous than any dissident.

“It was as if there were two people inside Yeltsin,” recalled his loyal aide Lev Sukhanov. “The first Yeltsin was a party leader, accustomed to power and privilege, and devastated when it was all taken away. The second Yeltsin was a rebel, who rejected the rules of the game imposed by the system. These two Yeltsins fought each other.” 166

The man who was to become the first freely elected leader in Russia’s thousand-year history was born on February 1, 1931, in the squalid village of Butko, on the eastern side of the Ural Mountains, which divide Europe from Asia. The Yeltsin family owned a windmill, a threshing machine, five horses, and four cows. This was enough to qualify as kulaks, or rich peasants, by the standards of Stalin’s collectivization campaign. Boris’s mother, religiously devout, like most Russian peasants, made sure that he was christened soon after birth. In this and some other respects Yeltsin’s childhood resembles that of Mikhail Gorbachev, his almost exact contemporary and future political nemesis. The main difference is that Yeltsin was a product of the great Russian heartland, while Gorbachev was born on the southern fringes of the country, where there was no tradition of serfdom.

Like the Gorbachevs, the Yeltsin family suffered as a result of the murderous collectivization drive. When Boris was three years old, his father and uncle were accused of being kulaks and “wreckers” and given three-year terms in a labor camp. This blemish on the family record was something the Yeltsins, like the Gorbachevs, blanked out of their lives. Although Yeltsin had vivid memories of his father’s being dragged away in the middle of the night, he never mentioned the incident publicly until long after the collapse of communism. 167

In 1955, the year Gorbachev graduated from the law school of Moscow State University, Yeltsin completed his studies in the construction faculty of the Urals Polytechnic in Sverdlovsk, formerly Ekaterinburg. A bastion of the military-industrial complex, Sverdlovsk was even more tightly sealed off from the outside world than other Soviet cities. The city was entirely off-limits to foreigners until 1991. For an ambitious young man like Yeltsin, there was no alternative to “Soviet reality.” He devoted his energy to making the system work.

Yeltsin’s former associates in the city describe him as a tough and unforgiving taskmaster. Appointed regional party secretary in 1976, the former builder ran the city like a giant construction site, setting firm deadlines and personally inspecting the work of his subordinates. If a project was not completed on time, he made sure that someone was punished. In one celebrated incident he announced he would travel along a projected 220-mile highway from Sverdlovsk to the northern town of Serov in exactly a year. Officials from every village and town along the route were told to accompany him. Those who failed to complete their allotted sections on time were warned that they would be thrown off the bus and made to walk.