Yeltsin полностью

For all his eagerness to lead them, Yeltsin’s initial reaction to the Interregional luminaries as people had been one of culture shock. At the summer meetings, he “looked on them as something alien” and did not want to be photographed in their company.⁷⁶ The secretary of the group, the same Arkadii Murashov who cast the objecting vote in the Moscow council in 1987, says Yeltsin kept a sphinx-like silence in caucus and almost never spoke in the steering committee.⁷⁷ Nevertheless, as the only co-chairman to sit in the Supreme Soviet, Yeltsin represented the group’s views in that body. More vitally, he metabolized heretical ideas—by osmosis and in exchanges brokered by Popov, Mikhail Poltoranin, and Murashov, all of whom stressed that interlocutors were never to take a professorial attitude toward him. Yurii Afanas’ev, the economist Nikolai Shmelëv, the aeronautics specialist Yurii Ryzhov, and the theater director Mark Zakharov were among those who found a common language with Yeltsin. Excited to be in out of the cold, Yeltsin awakened to the need to have a modicum of system and coherence in his thoughts.⁷⁸ He was playing with the kind of ideas it had once been his duty as a Communist Party boss to suffocate. What Popov and the Interregionals were now saying about the regime, and Yeltsin with them, was scarcely less damning of Soviet ways than what Yeltsin had execrated the political prisoner Valerian Morozov for saying in Sverdlovsk in 1983. One of Morozov’s misdemeanors had been to go to Gorky in search of the castaway Sakharov, who now, a few years later, was in harness with deputy Yeltsin.

For Popov, the man from Sverdlovsk, warts and all, was the answer to a prayer. He personified the longing for change and had the reassuring quality of hailing from the ranks of the establishment. “We reconnoitered for a very long time, we picked them over. But here in fact was life throwing Yeltsin into our hands. They themselves kicked him out, they themselves made him a renegade.”⁷⁹ Popov was sure Yeltsin would find a way around the queasiness of the intellectuals in the MDG. Any possibility of the saintly Sakharov becoming Russia’s Václav Havel was extinguished when he died of a heart attack on December 14, 1989, at the age of sixty-eight. Yeltsin garnered respect by walking behind the bier in a sleet storm, speaking briefly at Luzhniki, and then going to the graveyard and to the funeral repast. The entente with Russia’s Westernizers was contemporaneous with the fall of the Berlin Wall and of satellite regimes in Eastern Europe in the autumn of 1989. For the first time, Yeltsin’s statements were emphasizing democracy and some species of market economy as facets of “de-monopolization.”

The learning process was accelerated by a whirlwind tour of the United States from September 9 to 17, 1989, sponsored by the Esalen Foundation of California. In New York, Yeltsin did a walkabout in Manhattan, went to the top of the Empire State Building, helicoptered twice around the Statue of Liberty (he was “doubly free,” he told Sukhanov), gave lectures at Columbia University and the Council on Foreign Relations and to Wall Street investors (wowing some and offending others),⁸⁰ and was interviewed on Good Morning, America. He spoke at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the World Affairs Council of Dallas, and the University of Miami, met corporate executives at several stops, wore a white ten-gallon hat in Texas, and stopped in on an Indiana hog farm, the Johnson Space Center, Ronald Reagan’s hospital room at the Mayo Clinic, and a Florida beach house. Yeltsin had been to Western Europe as a representative of the CPSU; this was his first encounter with the United States and his first with any capitalist country as a private citizen.