greet Yeltsin, and a young lady with a bunch of roses. When he came down the steps, Yeltsin turned around and urinated on the back tire of the plane.” Yeltsin was bundled into his hotel, where he spent the night drinking Jack Daniels. He was so intoxicated the next morning he could hardly stand, said Garrison. An admirer of Gorbachev, Garrison came to dislike Gorbachev’s “forceful, primitive and highly erratic” rival, who was “completely consumed with a dark passion” for overthrowing the Soviet leader. Yeltsin managed to give his lecture but “with the students laughing at him, not with him.”[86]
As Yeltsin was struggling through his speech at Johns Hopkins, the White House called to say that the Russian president, who had requested a meeting with President Bush, would be granted a session at 11:30 a.m. in the White House with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, with the possibility that Bush might “drop by.” Bush did not want to offend Gorbachev by giving his fiercest critic anything resembling a summit meeting in Washington, particularly at a time when he and the Soviet leader were working together to achieve a number of American goals, such as the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. The party drove at speed to Washington and arrived at 12:15 p.m. “Jim, you are late,” said Bush’s special assistant, Condoleezza Rice. “Condi, you have no idea,” replied Garrison.
Yeltsin at first refused to enter the White House unless Bush would promise to meet him. He protested, “I am an important man in my country.” But when told Scowcroft would not wait, he crossed the threshold. The national security adviser greeted him truculently with the question “What is the meaning of your trip to Washington?” Yeltsin retorted, “You want to know the meaning of life?” The White House official and his deputy, Robert Gates, were treated to what Gates later described as an “excruciatingly monotonous presentation” from the boorish visitor. Scowcroft at one point closed his eyes as if sleeping.[87] When Vice President Quayle dropped by, Yeltsin stared at him hard and long without speaking until Quayle left, crushed. Bush at last appeared in the room. The Russian, suddenly stone cold sober, proceeded to give an earnest account of the situation back home. Later, White House sources told reporters that the visitor was a lightweight with no political future, who had made “off-the-wall” predictions about the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Tipped off about the Russian’s behavior, the
This latest attempt to discredit the people’s hero also backfired. Copies of
Later, however, after Yeltsin returned to Moscow, Soviet television obtained footage of him slurring his words at the Baltimore event. Under orders from Gorbachev’s aides, the progressive head of state television, Mikhail Nenashev, was forced to broadcast it nationwide at prime time, though he was against putting it on air at all and took care to include shots of Yeltsin arriving home with a gift of 100,000 disposable syringes for hospitals.[88] Yeltsin claimed the tape was deliberately slowed down by the KGB to make him look intoxicated, though even his supporters inside Soviet television doubted that this was true. Nevertheless, the episode deepened Yeltsin’s hatred for Gorbachev and Gorbachev’s contempt for his adversary.
A week after the
Yeltsin told him that after his official car was driven off, four big men shoved him into the back of a red Zhiguli and dropped him from the bridge with a sack tied over his head. He would have drowned if he had not managed to free himself.
The guards made a report, and Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin took note of Yeltsin’s statement. Two weeks later Bakatin recounted the story to the Supreme Soviet, with Gorbachev in the chair. There was a flurry of press interest, with speculation ranging from the possibility that Yeltsin was visiting his mistress—a a cook in a dacha whose occupant was away—and that she had doused him with a bucket of water (the cook denied an affair), or that there was a KGB plot to kill or embarrass him, or even that he had showed up uninvited at a birthday party in Nikolay Ryzhkov’s nearby dacha, which Gorbachev was attending, and KGB guards had been told to teach him a lesson. Looking back years later, Korzhakov was still at a loss about what happened. The river was only a meter deep, he recalled. “It was a joke to think he would have drowned, and Yeltsin was telling me the water was over his head.”[90]
Gorbachev taunted Yeltsin about the incident in a televised exchange at the Supreme Soviet. But most people in Moscow preferred again to give Yeltsin the benefit of the doubt. He was a flesh-and-blood Russian, one of them, who drank hard, fell into rivers, spoke out, and took the consequences. The more he was attacked by the organs of communism, the more were ordinary Muscovites convinced that he was their man.
On the evening of December 14, 1989, Andrey Sakharov, the intellectual force for change in Russia who complemented Yeltsin’s crude political force, died from a heart attack. The former dissident was eulogized by a guilty nation that realized it had lost its moral compass. His body was laid out in the Academy of Sciences building, and tens of thousands of mourners queued in heavy snow to file past the bier.[91] Gorbachev and other Politburo members came and stood briefly to pay their respects to the honest scientist whom they had kept in internal exile as a dissident. Boris Yeltsin stood motionless for several minutes by his body, as if absorbing Sakharov’s spirit and acknowledging his own new role as undisputed leader of the opposition in a fast-changing Russia. Yeltsin was now the most prominent member of a loose collection of elected radicals known as the Interregional Group of Deputies, which had held some chaotic, freewheeling sessions since it was formed in a Moscow hotel lobby during the summer to press for speedier reform.
Before Sakharov was interred in the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery, over 100,000 people attended a funeral rally in a slushy car park at which calls for the end of the Communist Party’s monopoly predominated. Commuters in a passing train opened windows to shout and wave encouragement. The public mood was becoming more defiant of authority. Such displays boded ill for a party that relied on control of an apathetic people to remain in power.
Gorbachev pressed on with the reform process. He encouraged the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union to hold their own democratic elections to make their leaders more accountable to the people. Parliaments already existed in each republic, but the poll results were always fixed by the communist bosses, and the legislatures had little power to legislate.
Individual elections for all the republics were scheduled for March 4, 1990. The campaign in Russia was marked by enormous pro-democracy rallies in support of Yeltsin as a candidate for the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies. For the first time prerevolutionary Russian flags and anticommunist slogans appeared among the demonstrators. Fear of the KGB and police was rapidly evaporating. Things had gone too far for repression of political views, especially when the electoral process bore the stamp of party approval.
Over 8,000 candidates stood for 1,068 seats in the Russian congress. Gorbachev joked as he and Raisa cast their ballots that he had set up a party committee at his home to decide whom to support. He also warned reporters that the process had its limits. To split up the Soviet Union would risk the type of chaos that accompanied the Cultural Revolution in China.
Boris Yeltsin ran in Sverdlovsk District Number 74. He advocated an elected president, a multiparty system,
