As the Soviet economy went downhill after 1975, Yeltsin repulsed calls to strangle what little Stalin had left of free markets in the USSR. When irate Sverdlovskers agitated in 1982 for caps on the prices of meat and fruit in the farmers’ bazaars, he branded them economic nonsense and lauded competition and self-sufficiency. “Prices in the marketplaces,” he said, “depend on supply and demand. In order to lower them, we mostly have to move more farm products to the bazaars and to develop the personal gardens of the province’s residents. Then . . . prices will fall.”61 In the state sector, Yeltsin adopted a device called the “complex brigade,” which decentralized some economic operations to small labor collectives and let them qualify for wage premiums. The formula, found here and there in the provinces since the 1960s, was “the closest approximation to entrepreneurial initiative the official Soviet economy ever tolerated.”62
Where he had wiggle room, Yeltsin made extensive use of the tool kit of the communist state to improve physical and social infrastructure and consumer welfare. He addressed these issues because of a desire to do the right thing, because he liked playing sugar daddy, and because, in a flip of his dictum in the construction industry (“Whoever worked better would live better”), he felt that employees who lived better would put out more in their work for the state. A partial list of Yeltsin’s projects would take in: a start on a subway for the city of Sverdlovsk; eradication of its squalid barracks housing; near-completion of a south-north road artery through Nizhnii Tagil to Serov (this project began under Nikolayev in the 1960s, and Ryabov had been unable to complete it); “youth housing complexes” which gave younger families first crack at apartments and down payments, on condition of putting in two years of labor on the construction; pressure on heavy and defense industry to manufacture scarce household goods;63 new theaters and a circus in Sverdlovsk and refurbishment of the 1912 opera house; a line for the province in the agricultural program for the Non–Black Soil Zone of European Russia (an acrobatic feat, since Sverdlovsk oblast is not in European Russia); and a City Day festival in Sverdlovsk, instituted in 1978, and neighborhood fairs to distribute food and consumer wares before winter. Yeltsin borrowed good ideas from others. The youth housing complexes had been pioneered in Moscow oblast; he tweaked the model by reserving spots for blue-collar workers, invalids, and army officers. The first City Day had been organized in Nizhnii Tagil in 1976 by Yurii Petrov. Compared to the world-shaking decisions Yeltsin was to be privy to after 1985, this may seem like small potatoes; to those affected, it was not.
Ventures like these would make headway only if clearances and means not written into the binding economic plan could be procured. For getting to the Soviet pork barrel, Yeltsin’s intensity and connections were irreplaceable. “For our industrial province I hauled in from the center freight cars full of meat, butter, and other foods,” he says. “I telephoned, demanded, strongarmed.” He did the same for housing.64 His critics do not deny his deftness. Manyukhin pays homage to him for “beating out resources from the center” for local initiatives and extra goods and medicines. When push came to shove, “Boris Nikolayevich went all the way up to the general secretary.”65
