The resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev on December 25, 1991, will mark the end of a long-drawn-out and bitter struggle for power. It began not long after he was chosen as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on March 11, 1985, on the death of his predecessor Konstantin Chernenko. As the ruling party in a one-party state, the Communist Party’s leader was the person who ran the country. Right away Gorbachev began putting together his own team to take charge. One of the first things he did was to recruit Boris Yeltsin.
The Soviet Union that Gorbachev inherited was a moribund, totalitarian society. Outwardly it appeared stable. The non-Russian republics seemingly acquiesced in rule from the Kremlin. Soviet engineers had sent the first man into space. Its military matched the West in weaponry. Soviet athletes were among the best in the world. The vast majority of its inhabitants were literate, and higher education was within everyone’s reach.
But thousands of political prisoners languished in detention camps, a legacy of the Stalin era. There was no independent media, no right of assembly, no free emigration, no democracy, limited freedom of religion, and near zero tolerance for public criticism of those at the top. Corruption and alcoholism were a way of life. The courts did the bidding of the party, and the police and the KGB could arrest anyone without legal redress. The secret police stamped out unauthorized activities, from art shows to student discussion groups. Foreign books, journals, and movies with unapproved content were banned.
By the mid-1980s the command economy imposed by Stalin was in crisis. City dwellers had a tolerable standard of living, but most of the rural population endured wretched conditions. Lack of competition and dependence on world oil sales had stifled domestic manufacturing. The country was involved in a costly and dangerous arms race with the West and an unpopular war in Afghanistan, which Soviet troops had invaded in 1979.
It was a society pervaded by cynicism. Many people joked that they pretended to work and the government pretended to pay them, and that the four most serious problems facing agriculture were spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
Things had to change. People were becoming aware of how the country was being left behind by the capitalist world in terms of freedoms and standard of living. A new generation of Russians was growing restless at censorship and travel restrictions. The aging communist leaders sensed the dangers and the need for improvement. That was why they had turned to the youngest and most energetic comrade in the top ranks, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Born on March 2, 1931, in a village on the fertile steppes of southern Russia, Gorbachev was an earnest communist from his teenage days. In his formative years the country was in thrall to Stalin’s cult of personality. At eighteen, he graduated from school with a silver medal for an essay entitled “Stalin—Our Combat Glory; Stalin—the Elation of Our Youth.” He studied law at Moscow State University, where he was open to new ideas, while aware that any deviation from the official line was, as he put it, “fraught with consequences.” He was active in the university Komsomol, the young communist movement. There he met Raisa Maximovna Titorenko, an earnest student in the philosophy department and a convinced believer in Marxism-Leninism, though her thesis on collective farms gave her an insight into the miserable life of peasants under communism. They married in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. In later years Gorbachev would joke that she was the head of “our family party cell.”
Conciliatory, smooth, and garrulous, Gorbachev was noticed by his elders as a natural-born political leader. He joined the party at the age of twenty-one and slipped easily into the role of apparatchik, a professional party member who makes a career in administration. Exceptionally, for a careerist, he looked at things with a critical eye. He became convinced early on that “there was something wrong in our country.” This was reinforced when he visited Czechoslovakia in 1969 with a party delegation and was met with rudeness by furious Czechs and Slovaks. The previous year, Soviet tanks had crushed the communist reform movement that had led to the Prague Spring and the promise of a more prosperous and just society.
In 1970 he was appointed first party secretary—akin to governor—in the Stavropol region, a rich agricultural area the size of West Virginia. Touring his fiefdom he found “sheer misery and complete devastation” everywhere. He met and charmed important Soviet figures who vacationed in nearby Black Sea resorts and who would later sponsor his upward climb. Eight years later he was brought to Moscow and shortly afterwards appointed to the Politburo, the syndicate of a dozen senior communist officials who determined everything in Soviet life, from war and peace to the price of vodka and bread rolls. He stood out among his older comrades with his combination of youthful energy, toughness, and effervescent optimism that problems could be solved with debate and imagination.
Though put in charge of agriculture, Gorbachev was sent abroad to get acquainted with foreign leaders. His suave manner and keen intellect charmed dignitaries more accustomed to impassive Soviet figures programmed to say
Gorbachev believed that the country was in a parlous state and could only be saved by fundamental reforms and the end of the Cold War. His comrade Eduard Shevardnadze shared this view. In December 1984, while vacationing together in the Black Sea resort of Pitsunda, the Georgian told him, “Everything’s rotten. It has to be changed.” It was almost heretical to utter such words aloud. Gorbachev now echoed them, in private, within hours of being given the top job by the Politburo. “We can’t go on living like this,” he told Raisa as they walked in their Moscow suburban garden, shivering in a temperature of 15 degrees Fahrenheit, after getting home at 4 a.m. from the Kremlin on March 12, 1985. Even the general secretary of the Communist Party would not risk saying such things indoors, for fear of KGB microphones.
Other influential voices urged him to make changes. Valery Boldin, a
When Gorbachev looked around for new blood in the party ranks, Yegor Ligachev, his silver-haired deputy, recommended Boris Yeltsin, the party chief in Sverdlovsk. “This is our type of person—we have to pick him!” enthused Ligachev.
Boris Yeltsin was born on February 1, 1931, in the impoverished western Siberian village of Butko in Sverdlovsk province. He started life with a splash. During his baptism the drunken priest dropped him in the font, and he had to be fished out by his mother. As a youth he was athletic, headstrong, outspoken, and quarrelsome. He also had an exhibitionist urge. At a school assembly Yeltsin accused an unpopular teacher of cruelty, which caused an uproar. She was eventually dismissed. Though he won his case, the school record stated his discipline to be “unsatisfactory.” Always a ring leader and daredevil, he lost the thumb and index finger of his left hand when he and his pals experimented with a stolen hand grenade.
In college Yeltsin studied engineering, became a model construction specialist, and later won promotion to chief engineer and then to head of the House-Building Combine in Sverdlovsk, a heavily industrialized city closed to foreigners. In 1956 he married Naina Iosifovna Girina, who was studying to be a sanitary engineer.
Yeltsin did not apply to join the Communist Party until he was thirty, and then mainly to ensure his promotion to chief of the Sverdlovsk construction directorate. Through his force of character and organizational skills, he rose through the party ranks until in 1976 he was promoted to first secretary of Sverdlovsk region. This made him the boss of one of the most important industrial centers of the USSR, as big as Washington State and with a population of four and a half million.
Hard-driving and authoritarian, Yeltsin often engaged in the old-style communist practice of “storming” to get a job done in record time. He admitted once that he was a fairly well-known type of Russian who needs to constantly prove his physical strength and load himself up to complete exhaustion. He made a practice of making unannounced visits to factories, walking in on school classes, going down mineshafts, tramping over fields, and squeezing into decrepit buses to hear about problems firsthand. He fired corrupt and incompetent managers and held televised meetings with citizens to answer their questions and complaints—daring actions for the time.
Despite his populist style he conformed to the prevailing orthodoxy and voiced ritual denunciations of Western imperialism. In September 1977, under instructions from Moscow, he ordered the bulldozing of Ipatiev House in Sverdlovsk, the two-story mansion in which the tsar’s family had been murdered, to prevent it becoming an anti-Soviet shrine.
Gorbachev and Yeltsin first met when the Sverdlovsk boss came to Moscow for sessions of the rubber-stamp
