Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

In his autobiography, Against the Grain , Yeltsin recalls the “intoxicating sense of power” enjoyed by regional party bosses who ran their fiefdoms like little tsars. “Whether I was chairing a meeting, running my office, or delivering a report, everything that one did was expressed in terms of pressure, threats, and coercion. At the time, these methods did produce some results, especially if the boss in question was sufficiently strong-willed.” 168

Yeltsin’s ability to get things done earned him considerable popularity in Sverdlovsk. It also impressed his superiors in Moscow, notably the party secretary in charge of cadres, the conservative Yegor Ligachev. At Ligachev’s recommendation Yeltsin was transferred to the Soviet capital in April 1985, a month and a half after Gorbachev became general secretary. By the end of the year Yeltsin had been promoted to the key post of secretary of the Moscow party committee.

As Moscow party chief Yeltsin quickly displayed a talent for popular, crowd-pleasing gestures. He fired dozens of bureaucrats, encouraged people to air their grievances, and began to reorganize the notoriously corrupt retail trade. To demonstrate his concern for ordinary Muscovites, he rode the crowded, ramshackle buses that brought workers in from their dreary suburbs and toured the half-empty grocery stores where housewives scavenged for food. A television crew often accompanied him on these occasions, provoking complaints from Politburo colleagues that he was seeking “cheap popularity.” Yeltsin’s real crime was that he was breaking the unwritten code of conduct for Soviet leaders. By ostentatiously giving up his Zil limousine, even for a few hours, he was undermining the system of nomenklatura privileges. A Soviet leader’s authority derived from his position in the bureaucracy, rather than his standing with the people. By daring to distinguish himself from his fellow apparatchiks, Yeltsin was destroying the party’s monolithic facade.

In seeking to establish his own direct link with the narod , Yeltsin was following a trail blazed by Gorbachev. What he failed, or refused, to understand was that they were playing by different sets of rules. As the supreme leader of the state a general secretary was permitted to have his own unique personality. His underlings were expected to remain faceless members of the collective. Besides, there was a hesitant, conditional quality about Gorbachev’s relationship with the masses. For Gorbachev, glasnost was a means to an end, a way of bringing pressure on the party from outside. The party remained the ultimate source of his power. Yeltsin, by contrast, was coming dangerously close to rejecting party discipline altogether.

In the early stage of perestroika, Yeltsin and Gorbachev had been natural allies. When his reform plans ran into a brick wall, Gorbachev used the human battering ram from Siberia to clear a way forward. It was important that the Politburo have a radical wing, to balance the naturally conservative majority. That way the general secretary could present himself as a man of compromise. As Yeltsin notes in his memoirs, “If Gorbachev didn’t have a Yeltsin, he would have to invent one…. In this real-life production, the parts have been well cast, as in a well-directed play. There is the conservative Ligachev, who plays the villain; there is Yeltsin, the bully-boy, the madcap radical; and the wise, omniscient hero is Gorbachev himself. That, evidently, is how he sees it.” 169

The Moscow experience had radicalized Yeltsin. He understood that the old command-and-administer methods would no longer work. He was frustrated that he was no longer his own master, as he had been in Sverdlovsk. Instead of helping him, his Politburo colleagues seemed intent on undermining his authority. He was particularly upset with his old patron Ligachev, who had come to personify the party machine. As the second-ranking figure in the leadership Ligachev chaired meetings of the all-powerful Secretariat, which supervised the work of lower party bodies. Yeltsin complained that the Secretariat was constantly interfering in Moscow’s affairs. For his part, Ligachev dismissed Yeltsin as a demagogue, who talked a lot and did very little.

The stage was set for one of the most dramatic showdowns of the Gorbachev era.

A SENSE OF EXCITEMENT surged through the wood-paneled conference hall as Gorbachev strode to the podium at precisely 10:00 a.m. There was a single item on the agenda of the Central Committee: the speech on Soviet history that the general secretary intended to deliver to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7. In a democracy the subject matter would have sounded arcane. In a crumbling dictatorship, such as the Soviet Union, it was electrifying, because it went to the heart of the way the country had been ruled and the kind of society it aspired to become. In a totalitarian state, writes George Orwell in his novel 1984 , “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.”

The conference hall—the same room where Gorbachev had been elected general secretary two and a half years earlier—was packed. Sitting in front of the gensek were the cream of the Soviet nomenklatura: party secretaries; generals; ministers; leading cultural figures; industrialists. A thick autumn fog had closed the city’s airports, and several dozen Central Committee members from distant parts of the country had been unable to reach Moscow in time for the plenum. Their places were taken by the commanders of military districts and regional party bosses. Like a pope delivering an encyclical, the general secretary was promulgating a new party line. When the conclave was over, the cardinals of the Communist Church would go forth and spread the Word.

The message that Gorbachev wanted to convey on this occasion was that the party had erred and strayed from the one true faith. Stalin was bad, but Lenin was good. Salvation lay at hand if the party could cleanse itself of the Stalinist “filth” and return to its Leninist roots. Communism not only could but must be reformed.

After the obligatory preamble, hailing the “colossal, grandiose achievements” of the revolution, Gorbachev set about demolishing the reputation of the man who had led the Soviet state for twenty-nine of its seventy years. He poured scorn on the notion that Stalin was somehow unaware of the mass repressions committed by his underlings. Stalin’s personal involvement, he told Central Committee members, was fully documented and “unforgivable.” To illustrate his point, he gave some specific figures. Only one member of the 1924 Politburo—Stalin himself—survived the great purges. Other victims of the terror included 60 percent of the delegates to the 1934 congress, 70 percent of the Central Committee that they elected, “thousands of Red commanders who constituted the flower of the army on the eve of Hitler’s aggression,” and “many thousands of honest party and nonparty people.” 170(This was a grotesque underestimate. The total number of Stalin’s victims, including those who died as a result of artificially induced famines and the forced resettlement of entire nations, which Gorbachev did not mention, is generally believed to lie in the range of thirty to forty million.)

By the standards of the time, it was a bold speech. Getting the Politburo to agree to the paragraph about Stalin’s “crimes” had been a major breakthrough, requiring weeks of argument. As usual, however, it took the general secretary far too long to make his point. As he droned on—for an hour, for two hours, for four hours—his attacks on the enemies of perestroika got lost in a general ideological fog. Perhaps this was his intention. In order to destroy the totalitarian monster, he had to proceed by stealth. If his Communist party followers had understood where he was leading them, they would certainly have rebelled a great deal sooner than they eventually did. A master of Kremlin intrigue, Gorbachev had perfected the art of camouflaging a major policy shift behind a rhetorical smoke screen. He would casually throw out the seed of a new idea and then sit back and watch it grow, adjusting his moral judgments to the political needs of the moment.