Although expediency was a factor, it did not make Yeltsin a political mad bomber and it was not nearly the whole story. Yeltsin was no neophyte to Russia-firstism. In Sverdlovsk he had discoursed on Russia as ugly stepchild of the Soviet Union and dreamed up paper schemes for giving it status and devolving some powers to its regions. While Russian rights had not been his priority before the 1990 election, in his first speech to the USSR congress in May 1989 he had advocated “territorial sovereignty” and “economic and financial self-reliance” for all Soviet republics, specifically endorsing a proposal from the Baltic republic of Latvia.33 By now, although the potshots from Medvedev and Gorbachev tried to obfuscate it, Russianist sentiment was quite widespread in the RSFSR elite. Partly it was contagion from nationalist movements in the Baltic and elsewhere and partly it pushed back against the Soviet congress’s decision on April 26, 1990, to put on a legal par with the fifteen “union” republics of the USSR the thirty-odd “autonomous” republics, the ethnic homelands implanted within the union republics, most of which were within Russia. “No other action could have so dramatized Yeltsin’s claim that the center ignored and repressed Russia and that Russia needed a strong leader and the right to abrogate USSR laws on Russian territory.”34 The clarion statement on the part of the RSFSR was its congress’s declaration on June 12, 1990, of Russia’s “sovereignty”
The opening of the RSFSR’s books was salt on the wounds of Russian rancor over the economic terms of Soviet federalism. Prime Minister Silayev persuaded himself that the center had for seven decades been robbing Russia blind. He was scandalized to find that the RSFSR subsidized the federal budget to the tune of 46 billion rubles (about $30 billion at the official exchange rate). With Yeltsin’s backing, he tried to pare the figure in the 1991 budget to 10 billion rubles and to pass that sum to sister republics through an RSFSR-controlled account and collect some of what was owing in kind as consumer goods.37 As talk grew of market pricing, Russia’s mammoth reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals looked increasingly like a pot of gold to be protected from the center and from poorer Soviet republics. And Yeltsin voiced sympathy with the labor movement that had taken shape in Russian and Ukrainian heavy industry in 1989 and gone on strike in favor of workers’ control over productive assets.
Crisscrossing the regions of Russia for three weeks in August 1990—flying on scheduled Aeroflot flights—Yeltsin was in tip-top populist form. In Sterlitamak, Bashkiriya, in the southern Urals, an invitation-only audience gathered in the House of Culture of the Caustic Soda Works:
Watching Yeltsin’s chemistry with a crowd, it is easy to see why local officials are eager to grab his coattails. . . . Yeltsin had just begun his remarks when an aide interrupted to tell him that the outdoor loudspeakers were not working and that the thousands of people gathered in the square outside were getting restless.
A few minutes later, Yeltsin left the elite stewing in the stuffy auditorium and squeezed through a window onto a low rooftop. The reception was thunderous. He doffed his suit coat and mugged for the delighted crowd until technicians could run a microphone out to him.
“Well, I think this event could have been better organized,” he teased, with a glance back at his embarrassed hosts.38
At several stops, Yeltsin was mobbed by well-wishers and had to step onto a streetcar or truck bed to get out of the press of people. In the hamlet of Raifa outside Kazan, Tatariya, where he had lived for five years before the war, he went for a half-hour swim in the local lake and then donated his striped swimsuit to his hosts, who made it the centerpiece of “one of the main legends of the village,” brought out for discussion once a year.39
