There is something disingenuous to Ryabov’s imputation of malevolence. In a hierarchical political order, the
In real time, Ryabov, enjoining Yeltsin to be more collegial,88 groomed him to be his successor. Ryabov got his big promotion out of Sverdlovsk in October 1976, when he was selected for the post of secretary supervising the Soviet defense industry in the Central Committee Secretariat in Moscow. To fill the vacancy, Ryabov saw Korovin and Yeltsin as the main alternatives and did not doubt which one he preferred. “Korovin,” he said, “was very diligent and finicky, and he had a lot of knowledge, but he did not have an iron grip, and the leader of such an organization has to have an iron grip and has to be strong of will. I consulted with my comrades and with the other secretaries, and with people from other provinces, and decided to recommend Yeltsin.”89 There was some opposition at home. The obkom secretary for ideological questions, Leonid Ponomarëv, had had it with Yeltsin’s two-fisted approach and convoked the obkom bureau off-the-record. Ryabov was in Moscow for the plenum of the Central Committee (which confirmed him in the Secretariat position on October 25) and Yeltsin, by chance, was there for a month-long training course at the party’s Academy of Social Sciences. Ponomarëv moved that the bureau speak out against Yeltsin and endorse Leonid Bobykin, the first secretary of the city party committee. It reached no consensus and would have had a hard time of it had it voiced an opinion different from the outgoing first secretary’s, especially once it was clear that Yeltsin had support in the Kremlin.90
Ryabov won General Secretary Brezhnev over to the candidacy, subject to vetting by party elders and forty minutes of chin-wagging between Brezhnev and Yeltsin. The central secretary for personnel questions, Ivan Kapitonov, had wanted Korovin as first secretary, and Brezhnev at first protested that “we in the Central Committee do not know [Yeltsin].” Brezhnev gave his seal of approval in their interview on October 31. “Even though I had always felt deep down that such a conversation might take place,” Yeltsin says, “I had tried not to dwell on it.” Brezhnev warned him that he would carry “additional responsibility” before the party because he had leapfrogged over Korovin.91
On November 2, 1976, a plenum of the Sverdlovsk obkom was convened to discuss “the organizational question.” “Everything went as planned,” Yeltsin remembered. Yevgenii Razumov, the apparatchik sent by Moscow to represent the Central Committee, moved on its behalf that Yeltsin be chosen first secretary. “As always, the vote was unanimous.” Yeltsin had written out a short speech, “feeling that it was necessary to do this,” and read it out to the obkom, which listened and adjourned.92
CHAPTER FOUR
A Boss with a Difference
At forty-five, Yeltsin was one of the youngest provincial first secretaries in the Russian core of the Soviet Union. The seventh of twelve apparatchiks to fill this post in the unofficial capital of the Urals between World War II and 1991, he would reign supreme in Sverdlovsk for eight and a half years, as many as he was to be president of post-communist Russia. Yeltsin’s kingdom was pear-shaped, with its capital city at the middle of the base and his native Butka tucked in its southeast corner. In area it was an amplitudinous 75,000 square miles. That was more than eight of the USSR’s fifteen union republics and about the size of the six New England states in the United States or, in Europe, of Austria, Switzerland, and Ireland combined. Its population of 4,483,000 put the oblast fourth among Soviet Russian provinces in 1979. Eighty-five percent of its people were urban—1,225,000 in Sverdlovsk, 400,000 in Nizhnii Tagil, and 189,000 in Kamensk-Ural’skii—and only 15 percent lived on the land.
