Conor O'Clery - Moscow, December 25, 1991

At first Yeltsin was able to use glasnost as an instrument of reform in Moscow. He summoned a conference of 1,000 members of the Moscow party; there, with Gorbachev looking on, he berated them for being complacent and ostentatious and for exaggerating success while cooking the books. On his instructions, the proceedings were published, and caused a sensation. People queued at newspaper kiosks to read Yeltsin’s outspoken remarks. Gorbachev himself had criticized “bribery, inertia and complete unscrupulousness in party ranks,” but Yeltsin was doing something about it. He was firing Moscow officials he found guilty of “toadyism, servility, and boot-licking.” These included one official called Promyslov, chairman of the city’s executive committee, who spent so much time on foreign junkets that a joke, which came to Yeltsin’s ears, ran that Promyslov made a short stopover in Moscow while flying from Washington to Tokyo. Yeltsin dismissed a party secretary who had the walls of his opulent home covered with animal hides, telling him, “You are only a party leader, not a prince.” He set out to “liquidate” many of the city’s redundant scientific research institutes, which had become the preserve of thousands of idle bureaucrats, something for which the faux members of the Soviet intelligentsia never forgave him. He tried to put a stop to enterprise managers exploiting workers from the countryside, who lacked Moscow residency permits, by hiring them as cheap labor.

The burly fire-breathing Siberian also took to barging unannounced into factories, hospitals, construction sites, schools, kindergartens, restaurants, and shops, as he had done in Sverdlovsk. He confounded managers with statistics. He had a gift for memorizing numbers. After studying documents en route in the car, he would emerge and make a point of showing that he was no ignorant provincial and he knew a thing or two about their business. He took to riding in the crowded Moscow metro and on the city’s ramshackle buses, particularly at rush hours. He joined lines at food stores to see for himself how people were treated. Unrecognized once in a meat shop, he ordered a cut of veal, knowing that a supply had just been delivered. Told there was none available, he charged behind the counter and found it being passed out through a back window. He had the management dismissed.

Yeltsin liked to reward those officials who met his high standards by giving them wrist watches. He would peel the watch from his arm for someone who pleased him, then a few minutes later produce an identical timepiece from his pocket to give to someone else. Once he made his assistant take off his precious Seiko to give to a builder. His bodyguard Korzhakov learned always to carry spare watches in his pocket. [36] 3 Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin, 72-73.

This storming of the bureaucracy by Yeltsin at first suited Gorbachev’s purposes in getting things moving. Gorbachev told him, without smiling, that he was a “fresh strong wind” for the party. The general secretary was doing his own round of inspections and meeting the public, but in the old style, giving advance notice that he was coming. On Gorbachev’s first visit as general secretary to a Moscow hospital, the asphalt on the road outside was so fresh the steam was rising, and according to his aide, Valery Boldin, the beds in the wards to which he was directed were occupied by healthy, well-fed security officers with closely cropped hair who warmly recommended the medical staff and the food. [37] 4 Boldin, Ten Years That Shook the World, 68.

Politburo members, accustomed to diktat rather than dialogue, fretted about Yeltsin’s populist forays around Moscow. In mid-1986 Gorbachev personally instructed Viktor Afanasyev, the editor of the party newspaper, Pravda, to downplay coverage of the publicity-seeking Yeltsin. [38] 5 Colton, Yeltsin, 131. At his urging the propaganda section of the Central Committee called in Mikhail Poltoranin, editor of the Moscow party newspaper, Moskovskaya Pravda, to dress him down for giving Yeltsin too much attention. [39] 6 Matlock, Autopsy on are Empire, 112. In those days the party could have editors fired. Though Gorbachev occasionally spoke up in Yeltsin’s defense, acknowledging that he was clearing the capital of “dirt and crooks,” he distanced himself from the Sverdlovsk “stormer.” So too did Yeltsin’s mentor, Yegor Ligachev, who did not like the way he was pushing party officials around. When Yeltsin shut down some special shops in Moscow, Ligachev lectured him for not making regular stores more efficient.

Resentment of Yeltsin among his comrades erupted in a confrontation on January 19, 1987, at a regular Thursday gathering of the Politburo in the Kremlin. Gorbachev was outlining an important speech he planned to make to the Central Committee on the next stage of reform. The content had been worked out privately in advance, as was usually the case. No one was expected to open their mouth at his presentation. But Yeltsin insisted on making a bellicose critique, raising about twenty comments on the text. In particular he challenged Gorbachev’s assertion that the system was capable of renewal.

“The guarantees enumerated, the socialist system, the Soviet people, the party, have been around for all of seventy years,” he said. “So none of them is a guarantee against a return to the past.” Yeltsin also urged Gorbachev to publicly name past Soviet leaders who were responsible for the country’s stagnation, and he demanded a limit on the general secretary’s term in office.

He had, he would later assert, become contemptuous of Gorbachev’s “selfdelusions,” his alleged fondness for the perks of office, and his tolerance for officials continuing to live opulent lives during perestroika.

Gorbachev was livid. His prepared critique of the shortcomings of Soviet rule was already as severe as the party members could swallow. Furious, he got up and stalked out of the room. For thirty minutes the entire Politburo sat in silence, avoiding Yeltsin’s eye.

The general secretary of the Communist Party had worked hard to get agreement from individual Politburo members on the propositions for reform in his speech. He considered the initiatives vital to his task of turning the ship of state around slowly and carefully without running it onto the rocks. He had taken risks with hard-liners by loosening party control. He had eased the suppression of religion and set free scores of political prisoners. Just a month previously he had released the exiled Nobel Prize—winning scientist and dissident Andrey Sakharov from internal exile in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). Editors were being allowed to hint at the truth about the terrors of the Stalin period and to fill in the “blank pages” of Soviet history. He was winding down the war in Afghanistan. He was about to announce the most radical reform in seventy years of totalitarian communism, the introduction of a form of managed democracy that would enable direct elections to a Congress of People’s Deputies. He was doing this in the face of widespread resistance to perestroika by party apparatchiks who saw their sinecures threatened.

And here was this disrespectful braggart from Sverdlovsk accusing him of maintaining the old ways.

When he came back to the room, Gorbachev let fly at Yeltsin in a sustained harangue that lasted more than thirty minutes. Yeltsin’s reproofs were “loud and vacuous,” he cried angrily. He never did anything but offer destructive criticism, and many people in Moscow were complaining about his “rudeness, lack of objectivity, and even cruelty.” According to Yeltsin it was “a tirade that had nothing to do with the substance of my comments, but was aimed at me personally,” with the general secretary swearing at him in “almost market porter’s language.”