If the early part of the Brezhnev period, when Yeltsin broke into party work, were halcyon days for the nomenklatura, the later years were not. The economy was in the doldrums, and there were signs of creeping social and political crisis. Urals minerals were increasingly expensive to mine, the labor to work its antiquated factories was running low, and agricultural production was stagnant. In no region of the USSR had negligence of consumers for the benefit of heavy and military industry been as bad. Per-capita supply of housing, food, and retail goods was below average. Of the thirty-seven worstpolluted cities in Soviet Russia in the 1980s, eleven were in the Urals and six were in Sverdlovsk oblast (Kamensk-Ural’skii, Kirovgrad, Krasnoural’sk, Nizhnii Tagil, Revda, and Sverdlovsk).6
Yeltsin had good reason to depict the first secretary in his autobiography as “god, tsar, and master” of the province, head and shoulders above the lesser mortals around him. “[His] word was law, and barely anyone would dare not to heed a request or assignment from him. . . . On practically any question, the first secretary’s opinion was final.” Yeltsin wielded his influence in Sverdlovsk, he insisted, only to benefit society. “I made use of this power, but to benefit others and never for myself. I forced the wheels of the economic machine to spin faster. People submitted to me, people obeyed me, and owing to that, it seemed to me, work units performed better.”7
Two hundred obkom staffers were at Yeltsin’s beck and call, dishing out guidance, punishment, and favors. He had a finger in every pie of political relevance, although he would stay away from organizational trivia unless procedures broke down or higher-ups wanted a report. He had the selfassurance to be open to his associates’ input. Taking a procedure from the construction industry, on Monday mornings he chaired a planning session (planërka) of members of the bureau of the obkom, where they were invited to raise their concerns casually. The formal convocation of the bureau on Tuesday (every second week, on average) was more crisply run. At several meetings a year, it was time for “personal responsibility”; bureau members did a self-evaluation in front of their colleagues, followed by a Yeltsin report card. As it tended to be in the Soviet Union, the party boss’s word was most conclusive when it was spoken, not written. If the two ever deviated, the verbal held. In countries with rule of law, formal understandings on paper take precedence. In the communist system, the primacy of informal oral commands and handshake agreements reflected the weakness of law, insidious secrecy and mistrust, and the need for authority figures able to cut through the thicket of often conflicting administrative requirements.
Yeltsin made short work of the ineffectual Yevgenii Korovin, sending him to the trade unions; Leonid Ponomarëv soon found himself an academic dean in Moscow; it took several more years to get rid of Leonid Bobykin.8 For the circle of obkom secretaries, Viktor Manyukhin, an apparatchik who worked with Yeltsin for fifteen years, notes in a vinegary memoir about him, “The principles of selection were cut-and-dried: good training, knowledge of the work, and, the main criterion, devotion [predannost’] to the first [secretary].” 9 The two party officials on the best terms with Yeltsin, Oleg Lobov and Yurii Petrov, both construction specialists, were each to make it to obkom second secretary, and Petrov would succeed him as number one in 1985 after several years in Moscow. But Yeltsin did not reward fawning praise, and for most appointments he was results-oriented. To head the oblast government, he picked the distinguished director of the Kalinin Works, Anatolii Mekhrentsev, in 1977. Yeltsin had an affinity for technocrats like him and for eager younger candidates whom he could promote—if they played second fiddle. With Mekhrentsev, although Yeltsin respected him, he fretted when Mekhrentsev was introduced that his awards and production medals would be listed. At an early meeting, Yeltsin cut off the introducer: “Don’t announce any awards; there should be no heroes among us.”10 There were interpersonal rivalries, and an intercity competition between Sverdlovsk and Nizhnii Tagil, but in the main the political elite of the oblast was tight-knit. Most obkom officials were alumni of either UPI or Urals State University; they communicated on a first-name-and-patronymic basis; they partied on one another’s birthdays and attended the last rites of family members. If there was a disagreement, the first secretary resolved it. When Manyukhin, as first secretary of the city of Sverdlovsk, criticized Petrov, a Nizhnii Tagil native, for bias toward the second city, Yeltsin sided with Manyukhin and had Petrov right the balance. 11
