Down with Big Brother (34 page)

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.

As far as Yeltsin was concerned, Gorbachev’s talent for vacillation and compromise was also his greatest failing. He was sick of the Byzantine maneuverings, the interminable ideological discussions, the constant sabotage of the apparatchiks. The fawning atmosphere surrounding the general secretary was another source of irritation. Yeltsin never forgot the fact that just a few years previously Gorbachev was running a relatively unimportant agricultural region, whereas he, Yeltsin, had been responsible for one of the most important industrial fiefdoms in the country.
¹⁷¹
While he admired Gorbachev’s courage for launching perestroika, at a time when he could have sat still and enjoyed the perquisites of power, Yeltsin was disillusioned by the lack of concrete results.

Yeltsin had come to the Central Committee plenum with a scrap of paper listing his grievances. He knew that the action he was about to take was politically suicidal, at least in traditional Communist Party terms. At the back of his mind there may have been a vague sense that the ground rules of Soviet politics were changing and he could carve out a new role for himself. Popular dissatisfaction with growing economic difficulties—hardships that many people associated with perestroika—was becoming a factor that the leadership could no longer ignore. But his main motivation was almost certainly psychological. It was the same inner voice that had urged him to get up at his school graduation ceremony, at the age of eleven, and denounce the teacher for being a sadist. The voice told him to screw his courage to the sticking point, say what was on his mind, and damn the consequences.
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When Gorbachev finished speaking, he raised his hand.

Ligachev was in the chair. At first he did not see his political enemy, even though he was sitting in the front row with other candidate members of the Politburo. The second secretary was about to bring the plenum to its customary close, a unanimous endorsement of everything the general secretary had said, when Gorbachev interrupted him.

“Comrade Yeltsin has some kind of statement to make.”

Yeltsin’s speech was disjointed. A smoother politician would have focused his attacks on one or two vulnerable targets. But Yeltsin scattered
his criticism in all directions, taking on the entire political establishment. He began by denouncing Ligachev and the powerful Central Committee Secretariat for “an intolerable style of work” that relied on “bullying reprimands” and constant “dressings down.” He then moved on to the failures of perestroika. The people were disillusioned by two or three years of empty promises, and their faith had “begun to ebb.” The party’s authority was falling. He concluded with a direct assault on Gorbachev’s style of leadership. He claimed to detect the beginnings of a new “personality cult” in the excessive adulation of certain Politburo members toward the general secretary. If left unchecked, such a tendency could become very dangerous. He was implying, in effect, that the father of glasnost could become another Stalin. Gorbachev’s face flushed with rage at this observation.
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There was a long pause as the burly Siberian collected his thoughts and summoned up his courage to say one last thing: “I am clearly out of place as a member of the Politburo. For various reasons. There is the question of my experience, and other factors too, including the lack of support from some quarters, particularly Comrade Ligachev. That has led me to ask you to release me from the duties of a candidate member of the Politburo.”
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“Having said all that, I sat down,” Yeltsin recalled later. “My heart was pounding, and seemed ready to burst out of my ribcage. I knew what would happen next. I would be slaughtered, in an organized, methodical manner, and the job would be done almost with pleasure and enjoyment.”
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Events developed exactly as Yeltsin had foreseen. Gorbachev was furious that the ritual display of unity on a festive occasion had been shattered. While on holiday, he had received a letter from Yeltsin outlining his grievances and threatening to resign. But he thought he had persuaded his protégé to postpone the showdown until after the anniversary celebrations.
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His own political maneuvering room had been drastically reduced. He now had no alternative but to sit back and watch the conservatives tear the most radical member of the Politburo to bits.

First to speak was Ligachev, the darling of the apparatchiks, who accused Yeltsin of “the purest form of slander.” By daring to suggest that the public was losing confidence in perestroika, Yeltsin had “raised doubts about our entire policy.” Other speakers accused the Moscow party boss of being a “quitter,” a “wrecker of party unity,” a “demagogue,” a “coward,” a “nihilist.” In all, twenty-five members of the Central Committee took the floor in the debate. Only one had a remotely kind word to say for Yeltsin. That was Georgi Arbatov, the Kremlin’s resident Americanologist, who praised the heretic for his “courage,” while joining the others in deploring the rift in party unity.

N
UMEROUS FOREIGN DIGNITARIES HAD
been invited for the seventieth anniversary celebrations, and the show had to go on. Yeltsin appeared on the top of the Lenin Mausoleum with the rest of the leadership for the big military parade on November 7. But he was already feeling the burden of social ostracism. As soon as the celebrations were over, he was thrown to the wolves.

Yeltsin was taken to the hospital on November 9. According to his own account, he was suffering from nervous tension, severe chest pains, and excruciating headaches. Gorbachev later accused him of staging a fake suicide by slashing himself across the rib cage with a pair of office scissors. “I was already aware of Yeltsin’s propensity for invention,” the Soviet leader wrote later.
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Three days later Gorbachev summoned Yeltsin to a plenary session of the Moscow party committee. In his memoirs Yeltsin describes how he was pumped full of drugs and hauled before his accusers. “I could not understand such cruelty,” he wrote later. “My head was spinning, my legs were crumpling under me, I could hardly speak because my tongue wouldn’t obey.… Scarcely able to shuffle my feet, I was almost like a robot.”
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The Moscow plenum resembled a Stalinist show trial. Ligachev with a smile of triumph on his face sat up on the podium beside Gorbachev. There was little pretense of giving Yeltsin a fair hearing. Instead his erstwhile colleagues and subordinates lined up to denounce him in the harshest possible way. Few of them knew what Yeltsin had actually said at the Central Committee meeting—the proceedings were not published until two years later—but they attacked him anyway. Working for Boris Nikolayevich was “torture,” said one district secretary. Another accused him of being the only person in Russia who did not “love Moscow or Muscovites.” A third official criticized his “cruelty.” A fourth complained that his regular personnel changes had become a “bad joke.” After his tormentors had had their say, Yeltsin did what the accused nearly always did on such occasions. He meekly confessed his “guilt” before the party and before “Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, whose prestige in our organization, in our country, and in the whole world is so high.”
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When it was all over, Yeltsin collapsed across the table. As he was leaving the room, Gorbachev saw him out of the corner of his eye and turned back. He grabbed Yeltsin by the elbow and led him back to his old office. They sat there, talking for a while, before an ambulance came to collect Yeltsin and take him back to the hospital. A few days later Yeltsin got a
phone call from Gorbachev, offering him a job as deputy head of the state building conglomerate, Gosstroi. It was a ministerial-level position, but outside the charmed circle of Politburo members and Communist Party secretaries. Yeltsin accepted immediately.

“I will never allow you back into big-time politics,” the general secretary added.
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Rarely have more fateful words ever been spoken by a Russian leader.

MOSCOW
March 14, 1988

T
HE OFFICIAL BLACK CARS
deposited the men responsible for molding Soviet public opinion outside an imposing portico on Staraya Ploshchad (Old Square) emblazoned with the words “Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” Uniformed KGB guards snapped to attention as the editors in chief entered the building, flashing the little red booklets that identified them as members of the nomenklatura. The visitors checked their coats into the ground floor cloakroom and then took the elevator to the fifth floor, where the party’s ideology secretary had his office.

If the Kremlin was the symbolic heart of the Soviet Union, the place where the Politburo held its regular Thursday meetings and foreign leaders were received, Old Square was the political nerve center. For decades the virtually unchecked authority of the totalitarian state had been concentrated in a labyrinth of buildings between the Lubyanka Prison and the Kremlin. Everything of significance that happened in the Soviet Union—from the approval of five-year plans to the appointment of a factory director in faraway Siberia—was grist to its bureaucratic machinery. Central Committee departments issued binding instructions to ministers and newspaper editors, army officers and Russian Orthodox bishops, factory managers and ambassadors. A special communications system, nicknamed the
vertushka
, linked the Central Committee with every important decision maker in the country.

Occupying a city block, the Central Committee was a luxuriously appointed bureaucratic machine. No expense was spared to ensure that everything was in perfect running order, in stark contrast with the rest of Moscow, with its crumbling facades and potholed streets. Every office was repainted once a year. A special furniture factory produced the desks, cupboards, lecterns, and long conference tables that adorned the offices of the apparatchiks. An entire section of the Ministry of Health—the Fourth Directorate—looked after the health of Soviet leaders. The Central Committee’s own farm supplied ecologically uncontaminated food for the staff restaurants, thus ensuring that the “servants of the people” did not have to eat the same poisoned food products as the people they served. When a senior official needed a new suit or a pair of shoes, he was outfitted by a special Central Committee tailor or shoemaker. Lower-level employees had access to a special section of the Gum department store on Red Square.

In the Communist utopia created by the apparatchiks for their own benefit, every rung on the bureaucratic ladder had its own special privileges and rewards. Dachas, medals, clothing allowances, and even cemetery lots all were distributed according to a Byzantine table of ranks. Instructors had the right to a new fur hat once every two years, while secretaries and drivers were limited to one every three years. A visitor could tell where power lay in the Central Committee by following the carpet runner in the hallway. It glided past the offices of ordinary apparatchiks but made right-angle detours into the suites of the top leaders. Another telltale sign was the portraits of the Communist deities. When a bureaucrat reached the rank of deputy head of department, he was automatically allocated a portrait of Marx instead of the standard portrait of Lenin. Heads of department had large portraits of both Marx and Lenin on their walls. Then there was the question of how tea was served. A lower-ranking official was served tea on a plain tray. Once he reached the rank of chief of sector, the tray suddenly sprouted a napkin. In apparatchik-speak, the promotion was referred to as “receiving the napkin.”