And then another note: “We hope that a year from now you will, in the Bolshevik way, tell us what you have not managed to get done.” Sure, agreed, one year from now I will tell you.78
What Yeltsin was presenting was the complex that Erik Erikson labels personal and occupational “overobedience.” Erikson’s thumbnail description of the overobedient Martin Luther is evocative of Yeltsin at this crossroads—“a certain zest in the production of problems, a rebellious mocking in dramatic helplessness, and a curious honesty (and honest curiosity) in the insistence on getting to the point, the fatal point, the true point.”79 Overobedience, as the Luther of Wittenberg shows, can be the antechamber to mutiny if the excitable concentration on means coincides with the setting in of incertitude about ends. And that is how it was with Yeltsin in Moscow.
CHAPTER SIX
The Mutineer
He was never at ease on the Soviet Olympus. The starchy protocol grated on Yeltsin. Unlike in Sverdlovsk, his coworkers’ homes were not close by, and they rarely socialized or played games together. “It was almost impossible,” to quote from the autobiographical
If his memoirs are any guide, Yeltsin was unsure what to make of the accoutrements provided him. His housing was middling and noisy, he said, and he implied that it was discrimination when he was not given quarters in the leafy neighborhood of Kuntsevo, in Moscow’s west end. Yet the “yellow brick building” on Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street in which the Yeltsins were accommodated—to Muscovites, the bricks and their hue bespoke a nomenklatura dwelling—was no hovel, and the family had as many square feet as on Working Youth Embankment in Sverdlovsk. As Yeltsin did not then understand, most apparatchiks assigned to Kuntsevo were lower in station than he and did not qualify for dachas. Yeltsin was supplied with one gratis in April 1985, a cottage shared with Anatolii Luk’yanov, the party department head who had just vetted him for the transfer to Moscow. If he at first thought his living conditions were too modest, they soon seemed Lucullan. Once in the Secretariat in July, he took Moskva-reka-5, the “state dacha” at the village of Usovo that had been occupied for several years by Gorbachev. He was “dismayed” at its ostentation. Set behind a stone wall, it was several times larger than Dacha No. 1 at Baltym, floored in marble, luxuriously furnished, and surrounded by a garden and playing courts. Yeltsin also professes to have been troubled by the dacha staff—three cooks, three waitresses, a chambermaid, and a groundskeeper, all of them on the roster of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate—who were his as soon as he was raised to the status of candidate member of the Politburo.2
Introduction to the innermost circle of power nudged Boris Yeltsin to think more globally about the regime’s raison d’être and its stance toward society. Naina Yeltsina was to use an intriguing culinary metaphor to explain how improbable mutiny would have been if her husband had not decamped from the Urals and gained the metropolitan perspective. “Chances are, if he had not come to Moscow he would not have carried out that act [his speech to the October 1987 plenum of the Central Committee]. That is because you learn more about the layer cake of life in Moscow than on the periphery. Out there, life is simpler. There is no layer cake there, by job and by level of life. There, although he had his high post, I don’t think we lived all that much better than other people.”3 Like many ex-provincials adjusting to the capital, he began the process a tad starry-eyed about those who had admitted him to the club. Some recruits over the years had set about conforming to it and finding a way to benefit. For Yeltsin, though, as Vitalii Tret’yakov puts it, naïveté curdled into aggressiveness. “At first it was a positive, constructive aggressiveness, the wish to do what it seemed to him Gorbachev expected, and to do it better and faster than the others. . . . But when it came to light that the general secretary did not view Yeltsin’s zeal and
