grabbing a quick lunch and fighting fatigue and the onset of influenza as he prepares for the speech that will mark his transition from presidential to civilian life.
Yeltsin will take Gorbachev’s place there behind the Kremlin’s high, red-brick walls, completing the remarkable resurrection that began four years ago, when he was left a broken man, physically and psychologically, and demoted from Moscow party chief to the junior post of first deputy chairman of the state committee for construction.
Chapter 9
BACK FROM THE DEAD
Mikhail Gorbachev’s warning to Boris Yeltsin in November 1987 that he would never let him into politics again left the former Moscow party chief with a sense of despair. He felt that “where my heart had been was a burnt-out cinder.”
Nevertheless, Gorbachev had given him a secure job in Moscow as first deputy chairman of the state committee for construction and allowed him to remain a member of the Central Committee, when he could have banished him to the provinces and gotten rid of him once and for all.
Yeltsin surmised sourly that if Gorbachev didn’t have a Yeltsin he would have to invent one. However much Gorbachev disliked him, Yeltsin was useful to the general secretary, who could play the role of wise, omniscient hero pitted against “Ligachev who plays the villain” on one side and, on the other, Yeltsin “the bully boy, the madcap radical.”
Gorbachev also had to protect his own reputation as a reformer. It would not have enhanced his growing standing abroad as an enlightened progressive if he had treated his political opponent in the old way. He had to show that he could be magnanimous even to an irresponsible wrecker who he was sure could not rise above street- level politicking.
Yeltsin spent several weeks in the hospital before being discharged. At home he endured crushing headaches and deep depression. “I felt like crawling up the wall, and could hardly restrain myself from crying out loud. It was like the tortures of hell.”[57] He couldn’t sleep and vented his feelings of rage on his family.
He began work in the state construction ministry in Pushkin Street on January 8, 1988, a mild day with snow drifting down in large flakes, arriving in a Zil with four KGB bodyguards, as he was still a candidate member of the Politburo. He was formally relieved of this post by the Central Committee on Thursday, February 17, and that evening had to go home from work in a mid-sized Chaika, without a security escort. The demotion was automatic but left him terribly distressed. According to his assistant Lev Sukhanov, it plunged him into psychological turmoil, and the inner conflict between the two sides of his character, the party boss and the rebel, began to tear him apart.
While Yeltsin was allowed to keep his apartment at 54 Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street, he had to move his belongings from Moskva-reka-5 dacha in Usovo to a more cramped country home. His security agents from the KGB’s Ninth Directorate were removed. One of them, Alexander Korzhakov, volunteered to stay on as a personal bodyguard and was consequently fired by the KGB. He was soon earning ten times more than he had been before. Korzhakov was taken on as a ghost employee by three sympathetic businessmen who were running cooperative enterprises that had been permitted to operate under perestroika. He did nothing except call round to each once a month to collect his “salary.” Korzhakov’s act of loyalty to Yeltsin marked the start of an intense friendship that saw the two men play tennis together and stay up drinking late at night. They became so close that they exchanged blood from their fingers, twice, to pledge eternal loyalty as “blood brothers.”
Yeltsin used his savings to buy a sturdy Moskvich car the color of an aluminum saucepan. Korzhakov tried to teach him to drive, an experience that he claimed made his hair turn grey, especially after his chief crashed into and seriously injured a motorcyclist.[58]
The restless Siberian had little to do in his new job and was closely monitored in case he got up to political mischief. Every morning, shifts of barely disguised KGB agents arrived to loiter in the corridor outside his office and observe who was coming in and out. His room and telephones were bugged. Lev Sukhanov called someone in Perm one day and complained about their working conditions, and a friendly KGB source told him the call to Perm had been noted and he should be careful.
The Moscow newspapers, still under party sway, were not permitted to publish anything positive about the former city boss. He went to Central Committee meetings, where he was ignored. In February the Paris newspaper
Gradually Yeltsin’s anguish abated. He began to go for walks alone in the street. People who recognized him stopped to smile and shake his hand. Here were the first hints that the long-apathetic masses were becoming politicized and that Yeltsin had acquired a popular base outside the party structures by giving voice to people’s resentments.
The following month it was Yegor Ligachev who overreached. When Gorbachev was on a trip abroad, the party’s number two instructed newspapers to publish a lengthy letter from a Leningrad schoolteacher, Nina Andreyevna, which defended Stalinist values and called for a halt to democratic reforms. Ligachev had sent a team to Leningrad to beef up the letter, and he pushed it as a manifesto of a new party line. No newspaper editor had the courage to refuse publication, though it was clearly a mutiny against perestroika. The country held its breath to see which way things would go.
When Gorbachev returned to Moscow, he and Alexander Yakovlev composed a lengthy response condemning the letter as an attack on his reforms and ordered the editor of
In the following months newspaper editors became even more daring. Books and plays challenging communist orthodoxy began to appear. The ringing of long-silent church bells was permitted. Informal meetings at Pushkin’s statue in central Moscow were allowed so that disgruntled members of the populace could let off steam. At these ad hoc gatherings the chant of “Yeltsin! Yeltsin!” began to be heard. The former Moscow chief was becoming a lighting rod for discontent.
In his absence, the standard of living had, if anything, deteriorated. A popular anecdote described a dog praising perestroika, saying, “My chain is a little longer, the dish is further away, but I can now bark all I want.” A well-motivated but disastrous antidrinking campaign by the Politburo resulted in an acute shortage of vodka and a collapse in government revenues. Sugar became
Yeltsin’s growing street profile and renewed self-confidence intrigued the media at home and abroad. In April Yegor Yakovlev, editor of
In a frolicsome mood, Yeltsin posed at the wheel of the boxy automobile with Korzhakov beside him and Sukhanov in the back, then on a whim he turned the ignition key and started steering the car towards the exit. Knowing how bad a driver he was, his passengers were terrified. “He mixed up the pedals, and it was jumping around like a kangaroo,” recalled Korzhakov. “I swear to God I never felt such fright,” said Sukhanov. “We went through Manezh Square and past the Exhibition Hall. We were trying to get him to stop. He said, ‘Those who are afraid, get out!’ We were hostages to the unpredictability of our chief. He drove all the way to his apartment block. We were so nervous, our shirts were soaking wet.”[59]
