Yeltsin полностью

To light his path through the Moscow labyrinth, the new maestro had neither the local knowledge nor the cohesive team he had in the Urals. The Sverdlovsk factotums in tow to Yeltsin were few; many of the Muscovites with whom he worked saw him as a hick. As in Sverdlovsk, he strategized Monday mornings with a kitchen cabinet, which by the end of 1986 included Valerii Saikin, Mikhail Poltoranin, his second secretary (the Sverdlovsker Yurii Belyakov) and secretary for ideological questions (Yurii Karabasov), and the head of the Moscow KGB (Nikolai Chelnokov). The official bureau of the gorkom congregated on Wednesdays. To keep it on its toes, Yeltsin again resorted to criticism and self-criticism, with the difference that he now shared his associates’ inadequacies with the press. The shared recreation that pumped up élan in Sverdlovsk would have been out of place in Moscow. Spinal and foot problems kept Yeltsin from playing volleyball after May 1986, when he scrimmaged at a Georgian vacation spot.⁷¹ His dacha was far from the cottages of gorkom staffers. There was no hunting range at which he could dish out quotas for fowl and game.

Yeltsin’s sense of responsibility to the regime and to the project of reforming communism spurred him on. And he craved personal success as ardently as he ever had, seeing no inconsistency between it and the reform cause. The Moscow assignment also elicited the testing script, as we have called it. As never before in his political work, Yeltsin after December 1985 felt the compulsion to show strength and proficiency. He recalls in Notes of a President how he “began to breathe in an utterly different way,” energized by the demands his new post made on him.⁷² In Confession on an Assigned Theme, he lays it on thick in describing the close of his workday. Arriving home, rarely before midnight, he would sit five or ten minutes in the limousine: “I was so worn out that I did not have the strength to raise my arm.”⁷³ His sleep budget, he declared to underlings, was four hours a night; he was up at the crack of dawn to exercise, read, and prepare for work. (Aleksandr Korzhakov confirms the schedule.)⁷⁴ Yeltsin, Korzhakov states, put great effort into memorizing names, facts, and figures: “Yeltsin came from the wilds and felt the need when he got the chance to underscore that there are people there who are as good as Muscovites.”⁷⁵ Symptomatic of the testing mode was the puffing up of the objects of his wrath into extra-large beings. Thus the district secretary drummed out for his apartment renovations was cast as comporting himself like “a prince”; others were preening “princelings” or “his majesty the worker of the apparatus.”⁷⁶

Yeltsin drew a connection between his efforts on behalf of reform and the determination of opponents to scotch them and even to do him in. In the Q&A at the House of Political Enlightenment in 1986, he selected for off-the-cuff reply questions that highlighted the point,⁷⁷ and hammered it home by quoting from an incendiary memorandum from another file:

[I have been asked] what privileges of officials of the Moscow city committee of the party we have abolished. . . . The question is incorrectly put. Why only abolish? We have added certain things—we have increased the amount of work and the number of bureau sessions, for instance. Gorkom officials no longer work from 9:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. but until 10:00 or 11:00 P.M. and sometimes until midnight. So far as abolition is concerned, for a start we have closed the [gorkom’s] commissary for manufactured goods. I think this is very useful. Gorkom workers will have a better feeling for our problems. . . .

I get letters like this, for example: “Khrushchev long ago tried to dress us in [inmates’] padded jackets. Nothing came of it, and nothing will come of you. We have been stealing and we will go on stealing.” Comrades, we can break up this cycle only through common efforts. . . .

I am being reminded that in three years I will have to give an account and answer for the promises I have made. I am ready for this and intend to devote these years entirely to the struggle.

And here I see a note of this sort: “Your plans are Napoleonesque. You are in over your head. . . . Go back to Sverdlovsk while you can.” (Cries of “Shame” from the audience.) Stay calm, comrades, I think the question did not come from this audience and that a note I received earlier has gotten mixed in. Looks like it was written by someone sick. . . .

Some people are concerned about how long I will have the strength to work on so killing a schedule. I can reassure the comrades my health is fine, I have nothing to snivel about. If it gives out, I will grab several extra hours of rest. Meanwhile, we need to work full bore, otherwise we will not turn things around.