Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

A turning point in Yeltsin’s intellectual development occurred during his first visit to the United States in September 1989, more specifically his first visit to an American supermarket, in Houston, Texas. The sight of aisle after aisle of shelves neatly stacked with every conceivable type of foodstuff and household item, each in a dozen varieties, both amazed and depressed him. For Yeltsin, like many other first-time Russian visitors to America, this was infinitely more impressive than tourist attractions like the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial. It was impressive precisely because of its ordinariness. A cornucopia of consumer goods beyond the imagination of most Soviets was within the reach of ordinary citizens without standing in line for hours. And it was all so attractively displayed. For someone brought up in the drab conditions of communism, even a member of the relatively privileged elite, a visit to a Western supermarket involved a full-scale assault on the senses.

“What we saw in that supermarket was no less amazing than America itself,” recalled Lev Sukhanov, who accompanied Yeltsin on his trip to the United States and shared his sense of shock and dismay at the gap in living standards between the two superpowers. “I think it is quite likely that the last prop of Yeltsin’s Bolshevik consciousness finally collapsed after Houston. His decision to leave the party and join the struggle for supreme power in Russia may have ripened irrevocably at that moment of mental confusion.” 127

Sukhanov devotes an entire chapter of his book Tri Goda s Yetsinym (Three Years with Yeltsin) to describing the wonders of the Houston supermarket. He records Yeltsin’s amazement at being told that the store stocked thirty thousand separate items. (The average Soviet store stocked fewer than a hundred, and many of these were usually “unavailable.”) Every aisle was an eye-opener for the visitors from Moscow. Scarcely had they recovered from the shock of the cheese section, where they saw “red cheese, brown cheese, and lemon-orange cheese,” than they were “literally shaken” by the quality of produce in the vegetable section. They were particularly struck by the radishes, which were as large as good-size potatoes back home and seemed to sparkle beneath the brilliant light of the store. Reluctantly they had to move on from the vegetables to the pastry section.

“You could spend hours in the pastry section,” exclaimed Sukhanov. “As a spectacle this probably surpassed Hollywood. At the counter there was a customer waiting for a huge cake, made in the form of a hockey stadium. The players were made of chocolate. It was a real work of art, but the main thing was that it was available for purchase, completely available.” 128

On the plane, traveling from Houston to Miami, Yeltsin seemed lost in his thoughts for a long time. He clutched his head in his hands. Eventually he broke his silence. “They had to fool the people,” he told Sukhanov. “It is now clear why they made it so difficult for the average Soviet citizen to go abroad. They were afraid that people’s eyes would open.” 129

The former party apparatchik understood the yearning of the narod— the long-suffering Russian people—for a normal life, its anger at being deceived and humiliated. He, too, had been humiliated. He, too, had been deceived. He would help the narod secure its revenge against the party establishment. The narod’s revenge would also be his.

DOMINATED BY A MONUMENTAL marble statue of Lenin, set between Corinthian columns, the long conference hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace had witnessed some of the most dramatic events of the Soviet era. Here Stalin had reached the apotheosis of his political power, at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, when he was officially described as “the greatest man of all ages and nations.” 130Here, too, the Gorbachev generation of Communists had listened, heads bowed, to Khrushchev’s impassioned denunciation of Stalin’s crimes, in his “secret speech” to the Twentieth Congress in 1956. Under Brezhnev the hall had been reserved for meetings of the Supreme Soviet. Every year newspapers around the world had carried the ritual photograph of doddering Politburo members raising their right hands in unanimous approval of party policy.

After serving as a totalitarian echo chamber for more than five decades, the great Kremlin hall had finally been turned into a real debating chamber. A large electronic scoreboard, placed to one side of Lenin, kept track of the innumerable votes. There were long lines of people waiting to speak at the microphones scattered around the hall. Outside, in the lobby, journalists rushed frantically about, nabbing deputies as they came out of the hall. Tables were piled high with draft resolutions, political pamphlets, official transcripts. On one side of the lobby there was a line of display boards, filled with telegrams from voters. The texts varied, but the message was always the same: The people’s candidate for chairman of the new Russian parliament was Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.

Egged on by Gorbachev, who accused Yeltsin of turning his back on “socialism,” the Communists did everything they could to prevent the renegade from gaining the highest political post in Russia. But their efforts to smear him backfired. The Communist candidate was so unappealing—both politically and physically—that he had trouble gaining the votes of all his fellow Communists. Independent deputies resented the Soviet president’s open interference in the election process. The longer they took to make up their minds, the more telegrams supporting Yeltsin poured into the Kremlin. After two inconclusive rounds of voting, Yeltsin was finally elected speaker on the third ballot, by a margin of just four votes.

Minutes after his triumph Russia’s new leader walked out of the Kremlin to thank the narod . They had been waiting patiently for hours, standing beneath St. Basil’s Cathedral and listening to radio transmissions of the debate. When they caught sight of their hero’s silver gray pompadour, they rushed toward him with a roar, chanting, “Victory, victory.”

“My struggle is the people’s struggle,” Yeltsin boomed, addressing his supporters from a grassy mound beneath the red-ocher Kremlin wall. “This is an important step in the victory of democracy. Now we need to continue the fight for the independence and sovereignty of Russia, for the revival of its national, economic, and spiritual image, so that Russia will live as it did before.” 131Acknowledging the cheers of the crowd with his fist, he crammed himself into the front seat of his Moskvich and was driven away.

In addition to a huge political constituency, Yeltsin now had a political stage vast enough to vie with that occupied by Mikhail Gorbachev. Russia was by far the largest, and most important, of the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics. Stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, Russia occupied 76 percent of the Soviet landmass, an area nearly twice the size of the entire United States. Its 142 million population equaled that of all the other republics combined. The republic accounted for 90 percent of Soviet oil production, 76 percent of natural gas output, and 89 percent of foreign trade earnings. It was no exaggeration to say that the Russian colossus held the key to Gorbachev’s success or failure.

Not only was Russia vast, but it was also ideally suited to the theme that Yeltsin had made his own, the yearning of ordinary people for a decent standard of living. Other nations had independence movements to distract them from their economic misery. Russia had nowhere else to go; it was the heart of the empire. The empire, however, had brought Russia nothing but headaches. The economic devastation left behind by seven decades of communism had caused many Russians to question the national tradition of constant territorial expansion, a tradition embraced by tsars and general secretaries alike. For the first time in many centuries Russians were ready to shed their traditional great power aspirations if this would lead to an improvement in their own living standards. It was a conscious turning inward, away from empire.