Down with Big Brother (33 page)

MOSCOW
October 21, 1987

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.”
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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.”
¹⁶⁵
It 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.”
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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.
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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.

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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(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.)