Yeltsin and Yakov Ryabov, his predecessor and booster, were at first in frequent contact. “He often phoned me,” Ryabov said, “and sought my advice on all serious questions.” When Yeltsin was in Moscow, he visited Ryabov at his Central Committee office and dacha. “We had a friendship that was not only official but informal, family.”17 In February 1979 Ryabov tripped up politically over unguarded comments on Brezhnev’s medical condition. He made them in Yeltsin’s presence at a semipublic meeting in Nizhnii Tagil and, says Ryabov, someone passed them on to Brezhnev—he believed it was Yurii Kornilov, the general in charge of the Sverdlovsk oblast KGB. His words were then used by the defense minister of the USSR, Dmitrii Ustinov, to turn Brezhnev against Ryabov. Ustinov had earlier held Ryabov’s slot in the Central Committee Secretariat, where he had several disputes with him about tank production; he had wanted the position for one of his clients in 1976 and saw Ryabov as a threat. Within a week, Brezhnev informed Ryabov he was being bumped to a position in Gosplan, the state planning committee. Ryabov was officially removed from the Secretariat at the Central Committee plenum of April 17, 1979.18 He served as first deputy chairman of Gosplan until 1983 and subsequently as minister of foreign trade, deputy premier, and Soviet ambassador to Paris—significant posts all, but mediocre compared to the appointment he held from 1976 to 1979.
Yeltsin, his ties to Ryabov common knowledge, feared for his own seat. “Boris Nikolayevich took Ryabov’s failure badly” and had “long conversations in the evenings” at his dacha with Sverdlovsk colleagues. Yeltsin appreciated that the fall of Ryabov “would for some time close off the road . . . out of Sverdlovsk,” and was on his guard.19 Two months after the firing of Ryabov came the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak, in which Marshal Ustinov was also a player. Yeltsin “was so enraged by the lack of cooperation he received [from the military] that he stormed over to Compound [No.] 19 and demanded entry.” He was excluded on the personal order of Ustinov. As a Politburo member who had known Stalin, Ustinov “far outranked a provincial party boss.”20 Yeltsin was to contend in a press interview in 1992 that the matter did not stop there. He went to see Yurii Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, in his office on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. According to Yeltsin, Andropov “phoned Ustinov and ordered him to take this facility down.” Andropov could not literally have given an order to Ustinov, his political equal, but could have pressed him to make the decision—or the scene could have been flimflam put on for Yeltsin’s benefit. In any event, it was Yeltsin’s understanding that Andropov had interceded and the program was discontinued. He found out in the 1980s that it was only moved elsewhere. 21 The germ-processing plant was evacuated to the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan and Compound No. 19 was continued as a proving range and storage dump. Yeltsin as leader of post-Soviet Russia was to inform U.S. President George H. W. Bush in February 1992 of the full story.
Not without guile, the vulnerable Yeltsin protected himself by turning to Andrei Kirilenko, the crony of Brezhnev’s who had been Sverdlovsk first secretary before Konstantin Nikolayev and Ryabov. Ryabov had looked up Kirilenko when Brezhnev gave him the bad news; Kirilenko was shocked and seemed to fear that he, too, would feel the effects.22 But Kirilenko’s high offices and long links to Brezhnev—they first worked together in Ukraine in the 1940s—kept him in the game until Brezhnev’s death in 1982. Kirilenko advocated as a priority continued investment in heavy industry and was not popular in the Sverdlovsk elite. Neither those problems nor the encroaching senility of Uncle Andrei, the obkom staffers’ moniker for him, deterred Yeltsin from paying recurring visits and tracking him down every year for a telephone call on his birthday, September 8.23
