The retirement of Grishin from the Politburo and Yeltsin’s shedding of his duties in the Secretariat were to be straightened out at the next plenum of the Central Committee. Grishin was given a minute to offer unctuous thanks to Gorbachev, and then all eyes turned to Yeltsin:
YELTSIN: Five and a half months ago, I was elected a secretary of the Central Committee. I exerted every effort to master my new duties. Now I am being given an extraordinary assignment. I shall do all I can in order to participate actively in every innovation taking place in the party and the country, in dealing with the problems Mikhail Sergeyevich has been speaking about. I will try to justify your confidence.
GORBACHEV: We certainly hope so, or else we would not be making such a decision. Do we all approve of this motion?
MEMBERS OF THE POLITBURO: We approve. The motion was adopted.32
At 8.7 million people, Yeltsin’s new domain was the megalopolis of the USSR. Moscow was, as Gorbachev said, the hub of government, business, education, science, and culture—in the Soviet constellation of things, it was Washington, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles rolled into one. Unlike other Soviet cities, it answered to the central authorities and not to the province around it. Its party boss was the senior local politico in the power structure and sat on the highest councils of the CPSU. Among the major figures who had held its first secretaryship in the past were Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Nikita Khrushchev. The office building of the Moscow party committee was 6 Old Square, cheek by jowl with the Central Committee reception at 4 Old Square; the two had been built around 1910 as matching luxury apartment houses for the Moscow bourgeoisie. Yeltsin was to make it onto the second tier of the Politburo as a candidate (nonvoting) member on February 18, 1986, which was when he officially left the Central Committee Secretariat so as to concentrate on Moscow. Moving up from a Volga sedan to a ZIL-115 limousine, he was now one of the fifteen or twenty most powerful people in the second most powerful country in the world.33 Under Brezhnev-era understandings on continuity in office, he would have occupied it carefree for two decades.
Control of Moscow was as sensitive an issue as any in Soviet politics in 1985–86. Viktor Grishin, a phlegmatic, half-educated mainstay of the Brezhnev Politburo now in his seventies, had been its first secretary since 1967 and had promoted the capital under his hand as the “model communist city.” His authority had been sapped by a string of scandals, exposed by Ligachëv and others, alleging falsification and thievery in Moscow’s trade and housing networks. Grishin sealed his fate in 1984–85 with an inapt play to present himself as the deathbed pick of Chernenko for general secretary.34
The selection of Yeltsin to dislodge the antediluvian Grishin was, once again, contested. The disapproval came this time not from a relic of the past like Tikhonov but from the likes of Nikolai Ryzhkov, the youngish technocrat who, with Gorbachev behind him, had supplanted Tikhonov as Soviet prime minister in September 1985. Ryzhkov, born in 1929 in Ukraine, was well acquainted with Boris Yeltsin. A UPI alumnus who made his career in Sverdlovsk, he had been director of Uralmash, the Urals Heavy Machinery Works, and sat on the oblast party committee from 1971 to 1975, when Yeltsin was head of the obkom construction department. Although Yeltsin had personal respect for him and the two talked civilly until 1990, Ryzhkov thought Yeltsin was egocentric and quarrelsome and that, as head of department, he had improperly “commanded” Uralmash to carry out tasks the party apparatus wanted done.35 Not being on the Politburo until some weeks after Yeltsin was brought to Moscow, Ryzhkov was out of the loop on that decision. Now that he was chairman of the government and a full member of the Politburo, he could not be circumnavigated. In a colloquy at Old Square before the December 23 meeting, Gorbachev and Ligachëv asked him if he approved of Yeltsin being made the Moscow party chief. Ryzhkov did not mince words. Yeltsin, he warned, while well and good for a party department or one of the construction ministries, could not be entrusted with a more sensitive, political mission. Yeltsin was by nature cut out for brawls. “He will chop wood,” said Ryzhkov, using a rural maxim as warning, “and it will be your elbows that will smart.” Not wanting a fight, he agreed to keep mum in the Politburo unless a fellow member asked his opinion, which none was to do. Some years later, Gorbachev would admit to him that he rued the day he snubbed Ryzhkov’s advice about Yeltsin.36
