The Last Empire (7 page)

George Bush apparently told his entourage that Yeltsin was a “real pain,” trying to use him in order to upstage the Soviet leader. He recalled the episode in his memoirs, noting that Yeltsin escorting Barbara to the dinner “would have been quite embarrassing to Gorbachev.” Scowcroft, who had taken a dislike to Yeltsin on the latter's first visit to the White House a few years earlier, was furious: “That guy's got to be told we're not going to let him use us in his petty games.” Jack Matlock, the American ambassador in Moscow, was instructed to deliver a message in this vein to Yeltsin's minister
of foreign affairs, Andrei Kozyrev. Matlock later wrote, “Yeltsin's behavior was both boorish and childish, designed to draw attention to himself and make both Gorbachev and Bush uncomfortable.”
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Despite their displeasure with Yeltsin, Bush, Scowcroft, and other members of the American delegation knew that they had no choice but to deal with the newly elected Russian leader. With Gorbachev's political star on the wane, Yeltsin was putting himself forward as the great new hope for the American government in its dealings with the Soviets. He was everything Gorbachev was not: a popularly elected leader who openly denounced communist ideology and was determined to conduct a radical reform of Moscow's policies at home and abroad. But could one really work with Yeltsin, given his eccentricities? And how should one handle him without undermining Gorbachev? These were major puzzles for President Bush and his advisers.

BORIS YELTSIN WAS THE SAME AGE
as Gorbachev and from a somewhat similar background. Born in the Urals in 1931 to a family of blue-collar workers, Yeltsin was a self-made man who attained the highest levels of power thanks to, among other things, his boundless energy. An engineer by education, he first made a name for himself in the construction industry, arguably the toughest sector of the Soviet economy. Always underfunded and understaffed, unlike the military-industrial complex, construction companies fulfilled their five-year plans by relying on the work of recent convicts and riffraff sent to building sites by party officials. Much depended on the individual construction chief's sheer strength of personality, of which Yeltsin had no shortage. He began his career in 1955 as a foreman in the city of Sverdlovsk in the Urals and bulldozed his way to the top by showing better-than-average results. In 1976 he was elected first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional committee of the Communist Party. At the age of forty-five he became de facto ruler of a huge industrial region that was much more important in the Soviet hierarchy of regions than Gorbachev's Stavropol
krai
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Whereas Gorbachev rose through the ranks by growing grain and entertaining Moscow party bosses who came to relax at the mineral-spring spas in his region, Yeltsin did so by fulfilling industrial production and construction quotas. In Sverdlovsk Yeltsin became known not only for what he built (his many completed projects
included the operetta theater, which the young party secretary loved to attend) but also for what he destroyed. In 1977, on orders from Moscow, Sverdlovsk officials demolished the house in which the Bolsheviks had executed Tsar Nicholas II and members of his family in the summer of 1918. The party bosses worried that the house might turn into an object of veneration and pilgrimage. Yeltsin destroyed as quickly as he built—the last refuge of the tsar, which had seen the demise of the old Russia, was demolished in a single night. The party could celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution with no physical reminder of the crime committed by the founding fathers of the socialist state.

Boris Yeltsin was always at home speaking to ordinary Soviet citizens and loved public adulation, but his rise as a democratic leader began only in the era of perestroika and glasnost, when Gorbachev invited the human dynamo from Sverdlovsk to come to Moscow. He soon took over the city administration, paralyzed by the metastasis of Brezhnev-era corruption. Yeltsin got rid of the old cadres and opened his office to city journalists, who adored the energetic, innovative first secretary of the Moscow party committee. But Yeltsin soon found that he was no longer his own master, as he had been in faraway Sverdlovsk. In Moscow, the powerful new city secretary had to deal with the even more powerful all-Union Politburo, of which he was a candidate member. His colleagues soon noticed that Yeltsin's bouts of feverish activity were followed by periods of depression.

Yeltsin clashed over the pace of reforms in Moscow with his former patron Yegor Ligachev, a former party secretary from Siberia who represented the conservative wing of Gorbachev's Politburo. In the fall of 1987 Yeltsin lashed out not only against Ligachev but also against Gorbachev himself, pointing out problems with the implementation of reforms and accusing Politburo members of adulating their boss. Gorbachev struck back, removing Yeltsin from his position at the helm of the Moscow party organization and revoking his status as a candidate member of the Politburo. Yeltsin's party career was now over. He pleaded with Gorbachev and his colleagues for forgiveness, but to no avail. His life seemed to have come full circle: he was sent back to supervise construction sites in a country that was still putting up buildings but was now beset with doubts about the “restructuring” of socialism. Yeltsin's expulsion from the Politburo was a defeat for
the liberal elements in Gorbachev's perestroika camp and a victory for party conservatives. A year later, the victorious Ligachev publicly lectured Yeltsin: “Boris, you are wrong.”
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But if the Politburo lost one of its radical voices, the emerging democratic movement in Russia unexpectedly found a leader in Yeltsin. The situation in the country as a whole was changing in Yeltsin's favor. Always mindful of the power of the party apparatus to interfere with his reform policies and unable to bring it fully under his control, Gorbachev had skillfully begun to maneuver it out of power. In 1989, the year after Yeltsin's expulsion from the Politburo, Gorbachev allowed the renewal of political activity outside the party, ending its monopoly of more than sixty years in the political sphere. The new electoral system introduced competitive elections for the first time in Soviet history, and party secretaries were told that they could stay in power only by being elected—not only to their party offices but also as heads of local soviets (councils). Real power was being transferred from the offices of party secretaries to those of the regional soviets and republican parliaments.

The party secretaries complained but did not rebel. They all got a chance to take part in the transition, and the most skillful of them succeeded in using the party machine and its broader influence to gain election to the increasingly powerful local soviets. Change at the local level was directed and encouraged from the top. In March 1990 the Congress of People's Deputies removed from the Soviet constitution an article granting the party special status in the Soviet state and society; it also elected Gorbachev to the newly created position of president of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev retained his post of general secretary of the party's Central Committee but almost immediately began to move his advisers and the most important elements of the party apparatus from the Central Committee to the newly created presidential administration.

Few former party bosses benefited from the sweeping changes introduced by Gorbachev more than Yeltsin, now his archenemy. When the first semi-free Soviet elections were held in the Soviet Union in the spring of 1989, Yeltsin embarked on a career path unavailable to any of the disgruntled Soviet politicians who had preceded him. He seized the opportunity with all his vigor and energy. “His anti-establishment bent appeals to common people,” read the bio of Yeltsin included in
President Bush's briefing book for the Moscow summit, “and his call to speed the pace of reform finds favor with the liberal intelligentsia.” If Yeltsin would not play the games of the apparatus, he was brilliant at playing the crowd. And there were plenty of crowds willing to listen at a time when perestroika was failing but glasnost was flourishing.
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Gorbachev's attempt to reform Stalin's centralized system of economic management had accelerated the speed of its collapse. Given the failure of perestroika's economic reforms, increasing shortages of goods, and growing scope for criticism of party policies, past and present, the Communist Party was losing the race with its opponents. The opposition organized itself politically at the First Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union, which took place in May and June 1989. There, reform-minded deputies from Moscow, Leningrad, and other major urban centers allied themselves with fellow reformers from the Baltic republics, who were pushing for wider autonomy and, eventually, independence for their nations. The alliance was directed against the party apparatus.

YELTSIN EMERGED AS
the unquestioned leader of the Russian opposition to the regime. Ordinary Russians were tired of Gorbachev's endless speeches, which produced few tangible results. The failure of Gorbachev's policies, which left store shelves empty and people dissatisfied, contributed as much to Yeltsin's popularity as did his striking political instincts and ability to rally liberal proponents of perestroika and the leaders of the Russian labor movement—all this under the national banner of the rebirth of Russia. In March 1989, against the Kremlin's wishes, the citizens of Moscow elected Yeltsin to the Congress of People's Deputies. In the following year, his native Sverdlovsk sent him to the parliament of the Russian Federation, where he was elected Speaker after defeating two Kremlin candidates. He then quit the Communist Party.

Yeltsin cut his ties with the party in the most public fashion imaginable—in front of the deputies to the party's last congress in July 1990. After the rejection of his proposed new name for the party—the Party of Democratic Socialism—the former party boss from Sverdlovsk delivered a speech announcing his resignation. He cited the need for transition to a multiparty democracy and declared that, as head of the presidium of the Russian parliament,
he could not take orders from any party. This was not an act that came easily to Yeltsin; nor did he take it lightly. He worked endlessly on the text of his resignation speech and grew very anxious as the day approached for its delivery. Late on the eve of that day, Yeltsin shared his concerns and doubts with Gennadii Burbulis, also a native of Sverdlovsk and his closest adviser at the time. “This was a man who not only agonized over his impending appearance,” recalled Burbulis. “He was most deeply concerned about what he was being called upon to do. . . . And he did not hide it: he said, ‘But that is what raised me!'”
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Gorbachev believed that leaving the party meant the end of Yeltsin's career, a “logical end,” as he told his liberal adviser Anatolii Cherniaev. In reality, Yeltsin's public resignation from the party signaled the end of its preeminent role in society, unleashing a wave of desertions from the party. They were generally undemonstrative: party members simply stopped paying dues, attending meetings, and carrying out party assignments. As the party lost members, its power diminished. In 1990, the year of Yeltsin's exit, it lost 2.7 million members, dropping from a total of 19.2 million to 16.5 million. Direct losses from resignations amounted to 1.8 million. Gorbachev later recalled that in the eighteen months before July 1, 1991, more than 4 million members, or close to a quarter of the total, either left the party or were expelled from its ranks for taking antiparty positions or refusing to follow party orders and pay party dues.
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The exodus left party bureaucrats flummoxed. In January 1991 a Central Committee secretary, Oleg Shenin, warned the secretaries of the republican and oblast committees that many of those who had left the party in 1990 were workers and peasants—a worrisome signal to a party that prided itself on just such members. Even worse was the mass exodus of the intelligentsia. While workers were always reluctant to join a party that offered few if any benefits to its rank and file, many members of the intelligentsia had been eager to join it in order to advance their careers and gain entry into the managerial class and, eventually, the
nomenklatura
—the top echelon of the party and state bureaucracy, which consisted almost exclusively of party members. Not only managerial positions but also those in institutions of higher learning and the vast and well-funded research sector were all directly linked to membership in the party.
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In the fall of 1990 cracks began to appear even in the walls of the most prestigious bastion of Soviet privilege—the diplomatic service and the corps of Soviet experts allowed to work in the West. Party membership was an important prerequisite for positions that allowed one to live in the “capitalist paradise” and collect salaries unimaginable by Soviet standards. Even though many Soviets traveling abroad had long been disillusioned with the system, they had hidden their subversive thoughts for some time behind a façade of loyalty to the regime and the party that embodied it. But the informal arrangement between the party apparatus and the Soviet intelligentsia, whereby the party agreed to accept formal declarations of loyalty at face value and the intelligentsia agreed to offer such declarations in return for the perquisites of working abroad, reached its limit in 1990.

Yeltsin's resignation from the party without losing his post as Speaker of the Russian parliament showed the elite that party membership was no longer a prerequisite for a professional career. In the last four months of 1990, fourteen Soviet officials working at international organizations in Geneva resigned from the party. The Geneva situation was discussed in a memo submitted to the Central Committee leadership by its Organizational Department. The authors of the memo fully recognized the ideological reasons behind the new phenomenon. The main culprit, they believed, was in Moscow. Some Soviet citizens in Geneva, the Central Committee was informed, maintained close ties with Yeltsin's circle and opposition newspapers in Moscow and were even planning to form a Geneva branch of the oppositional Russian Republican Party.