Ryzhkov’s doubts were about Yeltsin’s character and style, not about policy or obeisance to the regime. No one, not even Yeltsin, saw him as a prospective apostate and leader of the opposition. In December 1985, like Ryabov in his day, Gorbachev considered Yeltsin a force he could tame. Yeltsin knew the terms of the bargain: “I understood perfectly that I was being used to knock down the Grishin team.”37
But Ryzhkov was not the only queasy one. Yevgenii Razumov, the deputy head of the Secretariat’s personnel department, had known Yeltsin since 1976, when he was the Politburo’s representative at the plenum of the Sverdlovsk obkom that confirmed Yeltsin as first secretary. He is said to have spoken out against all three of Yeltsin’s 1985 promotions.38 Anatolii Luk’yanov, the then head of the Central Committee’s general department, says that when Moscow for Yeltsin was under review, he received many letters from Sverdlovsk lambasting Yeltsin and saying “you will weep” if he were to be given a lofty position.39
One issue that did not harm Yeltsin’s chances was his physical condition. Ligachëv in early 1985 had Yevgenii Chazov, the chief of the Kremlin medical service, do a briefing on it, saying he had heard that it was poor (Dolgikh said the same to Chazov). Chazov gave him a clean bill of health.40 Alcohol would have been one of the subjects covered. Luk’yanov has noted that “in Russia nobody is ever hired or fired exclusively on the basis of his attitude toward alcohol,”41 but there were limits to this leniency. Ligachëv, Yeltsin’s protector in 1985, was a teetotaler and, with Solomentsev, conceived the “dry law” of May 1985, the short-lived attempt to curb drunkenness and alcoholism among the citizenry. Ligachëv said to friends in the 1990s that Yeltsin did not touch a drop on his trip to Sverdlovsk in 1984 and no excess was ever in evidence.42 Had Yeltsin been a problem drinker, there would have been no invitation to Moscow or its party committee.
The Moscow position was an opportune outlet for Yeltsin’s urban and regional expertise, hankering for recognition, and love of a good fight. As citadel of the Soviet regime, the city stood for all that was amiss with communism and for its potential for redemption through reform. For a month after December 24, Yeltsin galloped through its factories, architectural monuments, and housing projects. His slow-ripening disaffection was giving way to political wanderlust and an itch to speak “the bitter truth” instead of “the sweet lie,” as he had put it on Sverdlovsk television in 1982. He committed wholeheartedly to the reform project and was determined to make his mark on it, repressing any reservations he had about Gorbachev as an individual. As Aleksandr Korzhakov, a former attendant to Brezhnev and Andropov assigned to Yeltsin by the Ninth Directorate of the KGB as one of his three bodyguards, recollected, Yeltsin was “the sincerest member of the party” in cleaving to the general course of perestroika. He “tried harder than the other party bosses to change life for the better.”43
On January 24, 1986, Yeltsin surveyed Moscow’s woes in a stentorian two-hour report to its party conference, held in the glittering convention hall of the Soviet trade unions—the place where Soviet leaders from Lenin to Chernenko had lain in state and Stalin’s show trials were held in the 1930s. Yeltsin wove his points into a parable of broader import. Under Grishin and Brezhnev, the city had been “infected by window dressing, an overemphasis on successes, and a hushing up of shortcomings [through] cooking the books . . . [and] fakery.” So inveterate was the illness, he said, that even calls for improvement “have been to a great extent perceived formulaically . . . lamely, at times cravenly.” “There may be some who think these judgments sound indelicate,” Yeltsin added, but “they had to come out.”44 Grishin, still a member of the Politburo, sat with a poker face on the podium, within spitting distance of Yeltsin. He did not ask to speak in selfdefense : “This is how we were raised, not to contradict the opinion of the [leadership], which was where the assertions of the keynote speaker [Yeltsin] were coming from.”45 He never grasped that the Yeltsin and Gorbachev messages might be appreciably different. Grishin was to lose his advisory post in 1987 and died in 1992.
