Yeltsin полностью

It was unhelpful, as historians have not appreciated, that Yeltsin already had doubts about Gorbachev. Stylistically, the two were oil and water. Gorbachev, from the sun-drenched plains bordering the Caucasus Mountains, had become a communist in his early twenties, received a law degree at Moscow State University (the oldest and most prestigious university in Russia), made his career in the Komsomol and in general party leadership, and was married to a Marxist philosopher. Yeltsin, from the frigid and rock-ribbed Urals, entered the CPSU late, studied at a provincial polytechnic, was a production specialist, and married another engineer. Gorbachev was sedentary and balding; Yeltsin was a half-foot taller, athletic, and had a full head of hair. Gorbachev was garrulous and even-tempered; Yeltsin was spare with words and irascible. Gorbachev’s favorite authors were the Romantic writer and poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), the Futurist bard of the Bolshevik Revolution who died a suicide; Yeltsin preferred Chekhov, Pushkin, and Sergei Yesenin (1895–1925), a poet who wrote of love and village life, married five times (including once to Isadora Duncan), and who also died by his own hand. In music, Gorbachev’s taste ran to symphonies and Italian opera; for Yeltsin, it was folk songs and pop tunes.¹²

After Gorbachev moved to Moscow as Central Committee secretary, Yeltsin found him controlling and patronizing, although he kept lines of communication open. Gorbachev hailed workmates in the Russian language’s familiar second person singular, ty; Yeltsin winced at this liberty and always used the more correct plural, vy.¹³ As we saw in the last chapter, Gorbachev for Yeltsin connoted overcentralization on questions such as locally manufactured farm machinery. At a deeper level, Yeltsin had qualms about Gorbachev’s grasp of the issues and his ability to lead the country. “Notes of disesteem for Gorbachev” wafted through his patter at meetings of the Sverdlovsk party bureau.¹⁴ Stoking Yeltsin’s unhappiness was his belief that Gorbachev, his exact contemporary, had overachieved. Stavropol was known for its wheat farms and its mineral-waters spas, at the ritziest of which, in Kislovodsk and Pyatigorsk, Gorbachev had been innkeeper to the holidaying Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Stavropol had half of Sverdlovsk’s population and, as Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs, was “significantly inferior” to it economically.¹⁵ But Gorbachev had come to Moscow as a secretary in 1978 and by 1985 was general secretary—and Gorbachev had not deigned to phone in April 1985 to recruit Yeltsin.

Nor was there any love lost with Ligachëv. Eleven years older than Yeltsin and a party member since 1944, he had a dossier replete in propaganda and personnel work; his service in the party apparatus dated from 1949, nineteen years before Yeltsin’s and four years before the end of the Stalin era. So many of Ligachëv’s choices as CPSU director of personnel, Yeltsin groaned to Ryabov, were from backwaters, “provinces not comparable to ours.”¹⁶ With 900,000 people, Tomsk, where Ligachëv was first secretary for seventeen years, was the fifty-eighth most populous Russian region; Sverdlovsk was fourth and even Stavropol was fourteenth.¹⁷ The January 1984 reconnaissance trip to Sverdlovsk that so gratified Ligachëv only got Yeltsin’s dander up. The one thing he had heard, Yeltsin informed the obkom secretaries before Ligachëv flew in, was that Ligachëv fancied buckwheat porridge for breakfast; they were to feed him well, show him around the oblast, and not darken Yeltsin’s door until the oblast’s scheduled party conference later in the week.¹⁸ True to his word, Yeltsin met Ligachëv at the airport and told him he would be too busy to squire him on his rounds, but looked forward to some conversations and to seeing Ligachëv at the conference. Several days later, informed that Ligachëv had shared tips on sowing and harvesting at a local kolkhoz, Yeltsin chortled that everyone should take the Trans-Siberian to Tomsk to “see how great things are there.”¹⁹ He at one point compelled the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk gorkom, Sergei Kadochnikov, to take “this idiot” off his hands, as Ligachëv had demanded to know why the city’s storefronts were not painted as nicely as in Tomsk.²⁰ The day of the oblast party conference, Ligachëv, a saturnine Yeltsin at his side, queried Sverdlovskers in front of the opera house about what they made of their first secretary.²¹ Not disheartened by Yeltsin’s petulance—possibly even heartened by it, since here was a man who put business before public relations—Ligachëv led him to believe he would soon be reassigned to Moscow at an appropriate grade.²²