Yeltsin полностью

Khrushchev and his then deputy, Leonid Brezhnev, brought Kirilenko back to Moscow in 1962 for a position in the Central Committee Secretariat. His replacement in Sverdlovsk, on Kirilenko’s recommendation, was Konstantin Nikolayev, a local who graduated from the UPI construction division in the 1930s and was secretary of the institute’s party committee during the war. Nikolayev, a 300-pound diabetic, depended heavily on Ryabov because of his disabilities and promoted him in 1966 to second secretary of the obkom. In January 1971 Nikolayev retired and Ryabov took over as first secretary; Nikolayev died several months later. Kirilenko, as a member of the Politburo, seems not to have figured in the decision, although he kept a hand in Sverdlovsk politics until 1982. Ryabov was happy Moscow accepted the need for an industrial expert and Urals man to have the job and not to repeat the experience of sending in a varyag (Viking) like Kirilenko.⁷³

You would never know Yeltsin’s dependence on Ryabov from the Yeltsin memoirs, which hardly mention him. Yeltsin was not one to concede indebtedness to another, and this feeling was strengthened in Ryabov’s case by their rupture of relations in 1987, when Ryabov took part in the attack on Yeltsin as Mikhail Gorbachev pushed him out of his high position.

Ryabov made up his mind in April 1968 to recruit Yeltsin into the regional party apparatus. He wanted to turn a page in the obkom’s department for construction, which had been run for years by the ineffective Aleksei Guseletov. When Ryabov raised Yeltsin as a potential head, some functionaries, aware of the belatedness of his admittance into the CPSU and of his past noninvolvement in Komsomol and party activity, were dumbfounded. The least Yeltsin could do, they thought, was earn his party spurs at the factory or district level, as Ryabov had.⁷⁴ They may not have known that he had paid his dues the past five years on nominally elected “soviets” (legislative councils) and local party committees or that a 1966 review of his work appreciated him as “politically literate” (politicheski gramotnyi), taking part in public service, and “having authority” in the collective.⁷⁵ In his memoir account, Yeltsin specifically links his 1968 appointment to his political activities: “I was not especially surprised to receive this offer, since I had been engaged constantly in public service.”⁷⁶ Partocrats consulted by Ryabov objected that Yeltsin was headstrong and abrasive. Ryabov would not leave it at that. “I asked, ‘And how do you assess him from a work perspective?’ They gave it some thought and answered, ‘Here there are no problems. He . . . will carry out what the leadership assigns him to do.’” No powderpuff himself, Ryabov swore he would get the most out of Yeltsin and, “if he were ‘to kick off the traces,’ would put him in his place.”⁷⁷ He was not the last to think he could domesticate Yeltsin and harness him for his purposes.

Ryabov ran the appointment by Nikolayev and made the overture to Yeltsin. “To be objective about it, he was not dying to have this job,” writes Ryabov, “but after our chat he gave his agreement.”⁷⁸ Yeltsin says parsimoniously that he consented for no better reason than he “felt like taking a new step.”⁷⁹ But he did not do it on a lark. He knew full well that it was a wise career move—onward to fresh experiences and upward in the pyramid of power. “I became not merely a boss but a man of power. I threw myself into a party career as I had once thrown myself into hitting the volleyball.”⁸⁰

Sverdlovsk oblast’s party committee and regional government were in a lowslung building on Lenin Prospect, across the Town Pond from where Vasilii Tatishchev established his ironworks in the eighteenth century. An Orthodox cathedral was demolished to make way for it in the 1930s. The six-man construction department was one of several offices the obkom, as in other provincial capitals, had for palliating the numberless frictions and contradictions built into the Soviet planned economy. It acted as a watchdog on personnel, oversaw the logistics for mundane and showcase projects, and encouraged “socialist competition” among work units to outdo one another in attaining output targets. Yeltsin considered this meddling in line management unexceptionable. By hook or by crook, “with the aid of pumped-up resolutions, reproofs, and whatnot,” the party organs would take care of nuts-and-bolts problems. “This was the gist of the existing system, and it raised no questions.”⁸¹