Gorbachev would not take the bait. Expecting deadlock, Yeltsin had bargained with Gavriil Popov and the Moscow liberals over a collective goingaway letter—in the woods outside Popov’s dacha, to block KGB snooping.26 But as usual he did things his way. He “wore out his speech writers” in drafting and redrafting his remarks and went over “all the details of the definitive moment—how he would mount the rostrum, how he would leave the hall after his statement, which doorway he would use.”27 On July 12 he asked Gorbachev to let him speak and then said to the hall that he was leaving the party. The umbilical cord was snipped after twenty-nine years. “Taking into account our transition to a multiparty society,” he said, “I cannot carry out only the decisions of the CPSU.”28 He then stalked up the center aisle of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, guffaws and whistles resounding in his ears. Soviet television broadcast the congress with a delay. When his statement began to play, Yeltsin came out of his White Office study into the corridor to watch the only large-screen set in the building. “His face was strained. He noticed no thing or person. . . . All that was important to him was to see himself from the side. As soon as the picture changed, he walked noiselessly to his desk—looking at no one, greeting no one, saying good-bye to no one. No doubt about it, this was one of the turning points of his life.”29 Yeltsin seems to have left his party card at the meeting hall. Family members did not see it again, and, unlike his Soviet-period medals, which he kept, it was not found with his personal effects in 2007.30
That evening Gorbachev’s guru, Anatolii Chernyayev, wrote a note to Gorbachev about Yeltsin’s “musical moment.” “You pulled teeth so as to keep the position of general secretary of the party. Yeltsin spit in its [the party’s] face and went to do what it was up to you to do.”31 Later in the congress, those leaders most at odds with Yeltsin—Yegor Ligachëv, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Vitalii Vorotnikov, and Lev Zaikov, who in 1988 had proclaimed the Yeltsin epoch to be over—were taken off the Politburo. The party as such would linger another thirteen months.
The Gorbachev group’s take on Yeltsin’s Russianism was that it was a smoke screen for his power-seeking. “All at once,” party secretary Vadim Medvedev said acridly to the Politburo in May, “he has become a Russian patriot, although he never gave a thought to Russia until now. This . . . is a dishonorable political game.” “Why is Yeltsin picking up this question?” Gorbachev inquired at the same session. “He is picking it up in order to play games. [He wants] to use it to make his way to power in Russia, and through Russia to blow up the CPSU and the country.”32
