be released.” Gorbachev proposed that he be censured for his politically incorrect tirade. The motion was passed unanimously. Even Yeltsin voted in favor. A few days later he wrote a letter to the general secretary expressing his wish to continue in the job as Moscow party chief. Chernyaev cautioned his boss: “The stakes are high. The supporters of perestroika among the so-called general public are on Yeltsin’s side.” But Gorbachev called his critic on the telephone to say bluntly,
News of a rupture in the Politburo soon began to leak. Rumors about Yeltsin’s “secret speech” at the Central Committee spread throughout Moscow. Fabricated versions began appearing. One was concocted by his editor friend Mikhail Poltoranin. In this version Yeltsin complained that he had to take instructions from Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, though he had said no such thing. Poltoranin distributed hundreds of copies, and they became part of samizdat, underground literature that the official media would not print.[50]
On November 7, 1987, the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution, Gorbachev and fellow members of the Politburo welcomed fraternal world leaders in Red Square to watch a military parade of goose-stepping soldiers and tanks belching diesel smoke.
Yeltsin was ignored by his comrades as they lined up on top of the Lenin Mausoleum, but diplomats, correspondents, and foreign visitors could not take their eyes off him. The small revolt in the formidable ranks of Soviet communism was world news. Fidel Castro gave him a big hug, three times, and General Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland embraced him, saying in fluent Russian, “Hang in there, Boris!” At a Kremlin reception for diplomats, American ambassador Jack Matlock noticed Yeltsin standing apart with a rather sheepish smile, shifting his stance from one foot to another, “like a schoolboy who has been scolded by his teacher.” The Moscow party chief smiled at him. The envoy kept his distance. The last thing Yeltsin needed was to be seen conversing with the American ambassador.
Political drama turned to ugly farce. Gorbachev called a meeting of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party for Wednesday, November 11, to confirm Yeltsin’s dismissal as party leader of the capital city. Two days before the meeting, on November 9, Yeltsin apparently tried to kill himself. He was rushed to the special Kremlin hospital on Michurinsky Prospekt on the outskirts of Moscow, bleeding profusely from self-inflicted cuts to his chest. By his account, “I was taken to hospital with a severe bout of headaches and chest pains…. I had suffered a physical breakdown.” At their apartment Naina took the precaution of removing knives, hunting guns, and glass objects, as well as prescription medicines, in preparation for his return.
Gorbachev took the attitude that the Siberian rebel was faking to draw attention to himself and avoid the showdown. “Yeltsin, using office scissors, had simulated an attempt at suicide,” he concluded. “The doctors said that the wound was not critical at all; the scissors, by slipping over his ribs, had left a bloody but superficial wound.” On the morning of the Moscow meeting he telephoned Yeltsin in his hospital room and told him to get dressed and come to the plenum of the Moscow city committee that would decide his future. “I can’t. The doctors won’t even let me get up,” protested Yeltsin. “That’s OK, the doctors will help you,” replied Gorbachev.
Acting on party orders, a Kremlin physician, forty-one-year-old Dmitry Nechayev, gave his patient a strong dose of a pain reliever and antispasm agent called baralgin. He “started to pump me full of sedatives,” recalled Yeltsin. “My head was spinning, my legs were crumpling under me, I could hardly speak because my tongue wouldn’t obey.” Yeltsin decided not to resist. He hoped that someone would speak up for him at the assembly.
Naina objected furiously to the overall head of security for Soviet politicians, General Yury Plekhanov, who was at the hospital, that discharging a sick man amounted to sadism. But Plekhanov answered to a higher authority.
Alexander Korzhakov assisted his charge, dazed, bandaged, and with his face swollen, to a car and drove him the six miles along Leninsky Prospekt and through the city center to Old Square. The setting this time was not the grand rotunda of St. Catherine Hall but the Hall of Meetings, a long, narrow, whitewashed chamber in the Central Committee building. Yeltsin was brought barely conscious to an adjoining room, where the Politburo members had gathered to make an impressive entrance.
When everyone was seated, they walked grimly onto the stage, like judges in a courtroom. Yeltsin trailed in behind them. The KGB had sealed off the front rows of seats for members who had put down their names to speak. They were, observed Yeltsin, mostly Moscow cadres who had been sacked in the previous year and a half and were waiting like “a pack of hounds, ready to tear me to pieces.” The Politburo members sat in three rows of chairs behind a long table, facing the hall.
Gorbachev got straight to the point. They were there to discuss whether to relieve their colleague of his duties as Moscow party chief. “Comrade Yeltsin put his personal ambitions before the interests of the party,” he said. “He made irresponsible and immoral comments at the Central Committee meeting.” He mouthed appeals and slogans, but when things went wrong, he manifested “helplessness, fussiness, and panic.”
One by one members of the Moscow party organization rose to follow Gorbachev’s lead and accuse the drugged and dazed Yeltsin of everything from overweening ambition, demagoguery, lack of ethics, and ostentation to blasphemy, party crime, and pseudorevolutionary spirit. Twenty-three speakers once more savaged him over the course of four hours. Only the Moscow party second secretary, Yury Belyakov, praised the collegiality, open criticism, and exchange of views that Yeltsin encouraged. One member sneered, “We’ll see people who will try to make Jesus Christ out of Boris Nikolayevich.” Another denounced him for treason to the cause of party unity. A third accused him of loving neither Moscow nor Muscovites. Their quarry only occasionally raised his eyes to look in disbelief as a former comrade abused him, and to shake his head when told he did not love Moscow.
Gorbachev grew uneasy at the fury he had unleashed. “Some of the speeches were clearly motivated by revenge or malice,” he conceded in his memoirs. “All of this left an unpleasant aftertaste. However at the plenum Yeltsin showed self control and, I would say, behaved like a man.”
In the tradition of show trials, the accused was permitted to display contrition after all the venom had been spat out and his morale demolished. He stumbled towards the microphone, his lips bluish, with Gorbachev holding his elbow, for the auto-da-fe. There were shouts of “
But inside he felt only bitterness and wrath. Yeltsin would never forgive Gorbachev for his “inhuman and immoral” treatment in dragging him from his hospital bed to be fired in disgrace. “I was dismissed, ostensibly at my own request,” he recalled some years later, “but it was done with such a ranting, roaring and screaming that it has left a nasty taste in my mouth to this day.”[51]
Everyone shuffled off to the exits, leaving their wounded prey alone in the room, sick, exhausted, and distraught, his head leaning on the presidium table. The last to leave the hall, Gorbachev glanced back as he crossed the threshold. He returned and put his arm under Yeltsin’s and accompanied him from the room, prompted, Gorbachev’s aide Andrey Grachev suspected, by pangs of conscience. The noble victor helped the vanquished off the field. Korzhakov got him into the car and rushed the stricken Yeltsin back to his hospital bed.
The job of Moscow party boss was given to Lev Zaikov, the Politburo member in charge of military industries, who boasted to Poltoranin, “The Yeltsin epoch is over.”[52]
Gorbachev hadn’t finished with his troublesome protege. He ordered that a version of the proceedings of the closed Moscow party meeting be published in
Yeltsin waited in his hospital bed for a call from his party leader to find out his fate. He expected that he would be banished from Moscow. But that didn’t happen. Perhaps unwilling to act in the old Brezhnev style, or because he felt that his bullheaded stormer still had a useful role to play, possibly even because he thought it was simply the right thing to do, Gorbachev rang the hospital a week later to offer him another job. Korzhakov brought the telephone to his bedside and heard Yeltsin respond “in a totally defeated voice.” Gorbachev suggested that he
