What Yeltsin digested on the job in the Urals—again, well before his move to Moscow—was that Russia was an “accessory” or “appendage” of the imperial Soviet center, an unsung “donor” to the rest. “In Sverdlovsk I thought about this and began to talk about it . . . not loudly but, you would say, under my breath.”80 Naina Yeltsina and the engineering institute where she worked preferred contracts with clients in Kazakhstan, where she had lived as a girl, to work with RSFSR organizations: The Kazakhs, unlike the Russians, could make decisions expeditiously.81 At the beginning of the 1980s, Yeltsin and Petrov jotted down a tripartite scheme for change: decentralizing the USSR’s federal system; making Russia institutionally whole by strengthening its government and giving it a CPSU central committee or some such structure; and carving the RSFSR into seven or eight regional republics, one of them a Urals republic, strong enough to make a go of it. They kept the sketch to themselves. Petrov summarized it two decades afterward in that Urals nostrum
The other area of probing that was a bellwether of the politics of perestroika dealt with relations between the leader and the mass of the population. Soviet partocrats rarely rubbed shoulders with ordinary people. When they did, it was at perfunctory affairs before docile viewers, pegged to state holidays or single-candidate elections, and more ritualized after about 1960 than before.83 As first secretary, Yeltsin did all in his power to spice up these rituals.
At the groundbreaking for the Sverdlovsk subway in August 1980, he invited Young Pioneers to attend, play the bugle and drum, and distribute flowers to the mud-splattered construction workers—and to the members of the obkom bureau, who lined up long-faced behind the first secretary.84 To mark the 1984 campaign for the USSR Supreme Soviet, Yeltsin organized a rail tour of remote districts of the oblast, in the dead of winter. The locomotive pulled two cars: a political coach full of obkom officials and an artistic coach containing twenty-two singers and musicians shanghaied for the journey from Sverdlovsk theaters:
Every day of the agitation outing, from February 20 to 25, 1984, through the soiled and almost uninhabitable towns of the north, followed the same program. In the morning, the travelers from the political coach went off to the next kolkhoz or sovkhoz, where Yeltsin would summon the peasants to keep their cattle stalls as spotless as their own homes. In the afternoon, he would give a report on political and economic themes to the local communists. But in the evenings, like balsam on the soul after wearisome speeches, reproval, and criticism from the first secretary, the long-awaited concert would begin. . . . [The performers] were surprised at Yeltsin’s abilities. As it happened, he not only knew by heart ditties from the operettas of Offenbach but reeled off the names of the workers at the enterprises that those on the agitation train had visited.85
In various appearances, Yeltsin departed by inches from the ceremonial. One way for which he had a fancy was spur-of-the moment gift giving. The gift of choice was a watch—remember the high value he and his Berezniki teammates placed on the watches they received as city volleyball champions—often unfastened from his own or an aide’s wrist. The first occasion of which I am aware occurred in 1977. Yeltsin had implored the director of the Nizhnii Tagil construction organization, Eduard Rossel, to help him win a “socialist competition” with the Severstal iron-and-steel plant in Cherepovets, Vologda province. Severstal had signed up to complete a large mill for making steel plate by December 25, six days before the end of the year. Yeltsin and Rossel assigned 25,000 workers in three shifts to the Nizhnii Tagil Metallurgical Works in order to commission their mill by a week before and qualify it as the largest industrial construction project to be finished in the year of the sixtieth jubilee of the Bolshevik Revolution. On December 18 the job was done, and Yeltsin spoke before a rally of the entire workforce. At the microphone, he took the gold watch off his left wrist and put it on Rossel’s. He told the crowd the day could have never have been won without them and Rossel, and explained that the watch had been given to him as a birthday present earlier that year by none other than General Secretary Brezhnev. The workers clapped madly.86
