them, and—if you will forgive me saying so, Mikhail Sergeyevich—I believe it suits you too.” He finished the communication by asking to be released from his duties as Moscow party chief and candidate Politburo member.
Gorbachev received the letter next morning at his dacha on the Black Sea, where he was working with aides. It came as a thunderbolt. Nobody in Soviet history had ever resigned voluntarily from the ranks of the Politburo. Chernyaev found him in a state of excitement. “Here, read this!” said the party leader. “What is it?” “Read it! Read it!” Chernyaev took the letter and looked through it. “What should I do with this?” asked Gorbachev. Don’t take precipitate action, advised Chernyaev.[46] Boldin read the epistle and thought Yeltsin had a point, as “Gorbachev, for whom maneuvering had become a habit, was really taking two steps forward, three to the side and one backward.”[47]
The general secretary of the Communist Party was confronted with a dilemma. He didn’t like the Moscow dynamo’s “overgrown ambition and lust for power.” Furthermore, a public split in the Politburo could damage the party. At the same time it might strengthen his own hand with the conservatives if they saw how pressure was building up among the most impatient comrades. He called his subordinate in Moscow two days later and begged him, “Wait, Boris, don’t fly off the handle. We’ll work this out.”[48] He asked Yeltsin to hold off on his resignation and keep working for another two months, until after the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution (which, because of a later change in the Russian calendar, fell on November 7), when Moscow would be celebrating and the city would be full of foreign dignitaries. Chernyaev recalled his chief saying, “I managed to talk him into it. We agreed that he won’t have an attack of nerves and rush around until after the celebrations.”
Yeltsin remembered the conversation differently. He believed Gorbachev had promised to respond to his letter when he came back from his vacation a few days afterwards. When weeks passed and nothing was said, he figured Gorbachev was quietly planning to make a show of him at a plenum of the Central Committee scheduled for October 21, 1987. This had been convened to hear the text of a groundbreaking speech on Soviet history that the general secretary was working on to commemorate the revolution.
The three hundred members of the Central Committee converged on a raindrenched Kremlin early that day without any sense that a blowup was imminent. They stepped out of their Zils and Chaikas and hurried into the eighteenth century Senate Building. The comrades assembled in St. Catherine Hall, then known as Sverdlov Hall, named after Yakov Sverdlov, the Bolshevik leader who supervised the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Here, in rows of ornate chairs beneath the stony gaze of eighteen prerevolutionary poets portrayed in bas-relief among the white Corinthian columns and pilasters high above, they awaited the single item on the agenda: Gorbachev reading his prepared speech. The fourteen Politburo members sat in a line behind a desk on a raised podium, facing the assembly.
Yeltsin took his place in the front row along with the half dozen other Politburo candidate members and various senior party officials. The meeting was closed to the media. By convention the advance speeches of the general secretary would be approved by acclamation, and everyone would retire to enjoy a pleasant lunch.
Ligachev presided. He called on Gorbachev to speak. The general secretary outlined his presentation. After thirty minutes he finished, and Ligachev asked, “If there are no questions… ?” Yeltsin hesitantly raised his hand, then took it down, as if he were of two minds. Gorbachev pointed him out to Ligachev, who asked if members wanted to open debate on the speech. There were cries of “No!” Slowly the big man from Sverdlovsk stood up, his intuition to speak out winning out over the pressure to conform. Ligachev signaled to him to sit down. But Gorbachev intervened. He would give Yeltsin enough rope to hang himself. “I believe Boris Nikolayevich wishes to say something,” he remarked icily.[49]
Yeltsin seemed nervous and ill prepared. He spoke for about seven minutes in a disjointed fashion, using notes jotted hastily on his voting card. Nevertheless, the thrust of his argument was clear. The promise of perestroika was raising unrealistic expectations that could give rise to disenchantment and bitterness. He was deeply troubled by “a noticeable increase in what I can only call adulation of the general secretary by certain full members of the Politburo. I regard this as impermissible…. This tendency to adulation is absolutely unacceptable…. A taste for adulation, which can gradually become the norm again, can become a cult of personality. We cannot permit this.” Besides, the opposition to him from Comrade Ligachev was such that he must resign from the Politburo, he said. As for his leadership of the Moscow Communist Party, “that of course will be decided by a plenum of the city committee of that party.”
This was sensational. Besides the fact that no one ever quit the Politburo, no one in the party had ever had the audacity to address a leader in such a manner in front of the Central Committee since Leon Trotsky in the 1920s. In Chernyaev’s opinion, “Such a brazen attack on the holiest of holies—on the Central Committee secretariat, on the number two person in the party, and on the general secretary himself—was truly scandalous.” Yeltsin rationalized later that, “Something had to be changed in that putrid system.” The general secretary had reverted to being equivalent to the tsar, father of the people, and to express the slightest doubt about his actions was an unthinkable act of sacrilege. “One could express only awestruck admiration… or delight at being so fortunate as to be able to work alongside him.”
There was a stunned silence as Yeltsin sat down, his heart pounding, “ready to burst out of my ribcage.” He knew what would happen next. “I would be slaughtered in an organized, methodical manner, and it would be done almost with pleasure and enjoyment.” It is doubtful, however, that he was ready for it.
Boldin saw Gorbachev’s face go purple with rage. The suggestion that the general secretary aspired to greatness through a cult of personality had hit a nerve.
“Perhaps it might be better if I took over the chair,” said Gorbachev. “Yes, please do, Mikhail Sergeyevich,” said Ligachev hastily.
Gorbachev coldly summed up Yeltsin’s speech and suggested that their comrade was seeking to split off the Moscow party organization from the party as a whole. When Yeltsin tried to interject, Gorbachev told him brusquely to sit down and called for comments from the floor.
This was the signal for a sustained assault. Sycophants and toadies, some of them victims of Yeltsin’s purges in Moscow, took the microphone one after another to berate the heretic. Gorbachev watched his nemesis as the hammer blows descended. He reflected how Yeltsin himself had put people down meanly, painfully, often undeservedly. Now he read on Yeltsin’s face a strange mixture of “bitterness, uncertainty, regret, in other words everything that is characteristic of an unbalanced nature.”
Some comments Yeltsin found especially hurtful. His one-time mentor in Sverdlovsk, Yakov Ryabov, who was then Soviet ambassador to France, doused him in what he later described as a bucketful of filth. The insults would have been part of the rough and tumble in some Western parliaments, but they were damning in the context of a Central Committee plenum of the tightly disciplined Communist Party in 1987. Even the most progressive Politburo members, Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev, rallied behind Gorbachev and spoke against the dissenter, something he found especially painful. Some denunciations were predictable. Viktor Chebrikov, head of the KGB, berated him for blabbing to foreign journalists. He was dismissed by others as clueless, someone who distorted reality, suffered delusions of grandeur, and was guilty of political nihilism. A few speakers unwittingly proved his point about Gorbachev’s cult of personality. “As to the glorification of Mikhail Sergeyevich, I for one respect him with all my soul both as a man and as a party leader,” declared regional secretary Leonid Borodin, with no trace of irony.
Twenty-seven speakers spent a total of four hours beating up on their quarry before Gorbachev brought the vilification to an end. Yeltsin meekly asked for the floor again. As had happened before, he was utterly overwhelmed. All his bravado had evaporated. He tried to be conciliatory. He never had any doubts about perestroika, he stammered. He agreed with much of what had been said about him. He had only two or three comrades in mind who went overboard with praise for the general secretary.
Gorbachev cut in. “Boris Nikolayevich, are you so politically illiterate that we must organize an ABC of politics for you here?” “No, there is no need any more,” he replied. Gorbachev twisted the knife. He accused his challenger of being “so vain and so arrogant” that he put his personal pride above the party and of having a puerile need to see the country revolve around his persona. And at such a critical stage of perestroika!
When Gorbachev had finished, Yeltsin mumbled, “In speaking out today, and letting down the Central Committee and the Moscow city organization, I made a mistake.”
Unexpectedly Gorbachev offered Yeltsin a chance to undo the damage. “Do you have enough strength to carry on with your job?” he asked. “I can only repeat what I said,” replied Yeltsin, to catcalls. “I still request that I
