Yeltsin полностью

In December 1983 Andropov, bedridden in the hospital, had a conversation about Yeltsin with Yegor Ligachëv, the new organizational secretary of the Central Committee. Andropov had selected Ligachëv, a straitlaced Siberian partocrat who had been on the outs with Brezhnev, on the advice of his lieutenant, Mikhail Gorbachev. By Ligachëv’s testimony, Andropov instructed him to go to Sverdlovsk and “have a look at” the local strongman. Ligachëv visited on January 17–21, 1984, inspecting farms and factories and attending the oblast party conference. He was smitten: “I will not conceal it: The liveliness of Yeltsin’s relations with people, his vigor, and his decisiveness appealed to me. It was obvious that many had heartfelt respect for him.”⁶ Andropov’s assistant for economic policy, Arkadii Vol’skii, remembered Ligachëv proposing to Andropov that they hand Yeltsin the construction department of the CPSU Secretariat, the Soviet-wide equivalent of what he oversaw in Sverdlovsk from 1968 to 1975. Andropov was for it, with the sidelong compliment that Yeltsin was “a good builder”—even though he had been a multifunctional party prefect since 1976. Andropov probably saw Yeltsin as fit for no more than the departmental slot, but Ligachëv saw it as probationary and leading to bigger things.⁷

Yeltsin’s appointment to the Central Committee apparatus was on hold during the interregnum of the Brezhnev epigone Konstantin Chernenko. Kremlin workhorses like Dmitrii Ustinov, the defense minister who forced out Yakov Ryabov in 1979, may have had it in for Yeltsin. If so, Marshal Ustinov’s death in December 1984 was well-timed. Chernenko died of emphysema three months later, and Yeltsin participated in the Central Committee plenum of March 11, 1985, which made Gorbachev general secretary of the party.

Gorbachev was initially not a Yeltsin fan. He knew little of him, and “What I did know made me leery.” They made their acquaintance in the two years after Yeltsin became Sverdlovsk first secretary in late 1976. Gorbachev had been first secretary in the breadbox province of Stavropol since 1970, and they swapped Stavropol foodstuffs for metals and lumber from the Urals. As Central Committee secretary for the Soviet farm sector from 1978 to 1985, Gorbachev crossed swords with Yeltsin two or three times over Yeltsin’s surliness with emissaries of Moscow. At a plenum of the obkom to discuss a Central Committee memorandum that took a swipe at the Sverdlovsk livestock industry, Yeltsin exchanged words with Gorbachev’s representative, Ivan Kapustyan. “I noted for myself,” writes Gorbachev in his memoirs, Life and Reforms, “that the Sverdlovsk secretary reacted inadequately toward remarks directed at him.” Besides, Gorbachev had seen Yeltsin wobbly on his feet in the Soviet parliament; from hearsay, he ascribed it to a drinking spree.⁸ To hear Gorbachev tell it, Ligachëv did not need to be asked by Andropov to go for the look-see in Sverdlovsk. He volunteered to do it and phoned Gorbachev late at night to tell him, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, this is our kind of person, we have to pick him!”⁹

When Gorbachev and Ligachëv did summon Yeltsin to Moscow in the first week of April 1985, their prize enlistee gummed up the works by playing hard to get. As Yeltsin says in Confession on an Assigned Theme, he spurned the offer relayed by Vladimir Dolgikh, a junior member of the Kremlin leadership. He relented only when Ligachëv stepped in the morning after and invoked party discipline.¹⁰ Yeltsin’s liking for Sverdlovsk and dislike of Moscow, where he had never lived and had almost no friends, argued against the move. He was assuaged some by his younger daughter, Tatyana, and his grandson, Boris, being in Moscow and by the willingness of elder daughter Yelena to move with them. As Tatyana said in a 2001 interview, her mother was to be homesick but not her father: “For him, the principal thing is work. Where he works is where he makes his home.”¹¹ The issue was what Yeltsin would work at in Moscow. He had ruled the roost in Sverdlovsk for most of a decade, and two of his three predecessors in the obkom, Kirilenko in 1962 and Ryabov in 1976, had been appointed a Central Committee secretary out of Sverdlovsk. (Nikolai Ryzhkov was made a secretary in November 1982, seven years after leaving Sverdlovsk, taking Kirilenko’s slot.) To Yeltsin, that, or at the lower limit, a position as deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union, was his due, and one of the CPSU’s economic departments, further down the pecking order, was not.