Yeltsin полностью

The local bosses of the ruling party originally functioned as its “law-and-order prefects,” tasked with projecting the center’s power and maintaining political stability.¹ This function continued to make demands on Boris Yeltsin’s time in the 1970s and 1980s. The territorial subunits of the CPSU paralleled the institutions of local government. Sverdlovsk oblast contained thirty districts (raions), each of which had a party committee; there were districts within the three largest cities; and a mass membership of 221,000 communists (as of 1976) formed a base. The obkom and its leader decided on about 20,000 personnel appointments and supervised all entities that policed, educated, and informed the population and mobilized it for the purposes of the regime. For emergencies, Yeltsin’s duty officer had prolix instructions on liaison with the KGB, the Committee on State Security (the OGPU and the NKVD under Stalin). Yurii Kornilov, the head of the Sverdlovsk KGB and a former raion party secretary, escorted him on his railcar and helicopter incursions into the backcountry.² “I often came by the agency,” Yeltsin writes in Confession on an Assigned Theme. “I asked to be informed about the KGB’s work, studied how it functioned, and acquainted myself with its departments.”³ Yeltsin also sat on the civil-military collegium of the Urals Military District and attended field exercises. Ministry of Defense brass conferred the rank of colonel on him in October 1978, presenting him with a dress uniform and an astrakhan hat.

Not that law-and-order obligations were ever forsworn; the party chiefs with the passage of time defined themselves more as “developmental prefects” for coordinating economic growth and ensuring that some of the benefits trickled down. Administrative intervention for harmony of operation was bound to happen in an economy where market mechanisms had been squashed by the state. In economic indices, Sverdlovsk oblast ranked third among Soviet provinces. The Urals staples of mining and metallurgy continued to expand, slowly. Beloyarsk, the Soviet Union’s first nuclear power station, powered by a sodium-cooled breeder reactor, started up in 1964 at the town of Zarechnyi, north of Sverdlovsk (it was disabled by fires in 1977 and 1978). In the 1981–85 five-year plan, Yeltsin and the oblast were active in the crash campaign to transport natural gas from the middle and lower Ob in west Siberia to customers in Europe; five pipelines and twenty compressor stations were constructed in the taiga.

In Sverdlovsk civilian pursuits paled before the production of armaments. The oblast had 350,000 military-industrial employees, more than any other Soviet province.⁴ Defense plants could not be mentioned by exact name or whereabouts in the media, and the province was off-limits to Westerners throughout the Cold War. The Urals Wagon Works in Nizhnii Tagil was the highest-volume maker of tanks anywhere in the world; its product is still wheeling around the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, India, the Arab world, and North Korea. Two of the ten cloistered “atomic cities” in the USSR lay north of the oblast capital: Sverdlovsk-44, known today as Novoural’sk, home to the Urals Electrochemical Combine, which was the largest factory for enriching uranium in the world; and Sverdlovsk-45, later Lesnoi, whose Electrochemical Instrumentation Combine was the country’s premier facility for serial assembly of nuclear warheads. Yeltsin as first secretary was accountable for the well-being of the atomic towns, whose very existence was a state secret. A number of flagships of military industry were situated in Sverdlovsk city. The Kalinin Machinery Works, for example, was an artillery plant retooled to rockets in the 1950s; it cranked out surface-to-air missiles (such as the one that downed Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk in 1960), medium-range ballistic missiles, and torpedoes. The Urals Turbine Works manufactured tank engines, the Urals Transportation Machinery Works armored vehicles, the Vektor Works missile guidance systems and radars, and Uralmash, the biggest employer in Sverdlovsk, artillery pieces. Military Compound No. 19, built in the Chkalov raion of Sverdlovsk in 1947 with blueprints from Japan’s Unit No. 731 in Manchuria, was the busiest of the USSR’s three centers for producing biological weaponry. An accidental emission of aerosolized anthrax spores from its dryer took nearly a hundred lives in April 1979. Moscow attributed it to tainted meat.⁵