Yeltsin полностью

Most of all, then, it was the fraying of his bond with Mikhail Gorbachev that disaffected Yeltsin. In his early months as Moscow chief, they spoke regularly. This tapered off over the course of 1986. A nitpicking point was the place of the Soviet first lady, Raisa Gorbacheva. Yeltsin felt she put on airs, and he was convinced that her husband told her more than was appropriate about political issues (often on long walks upon Gorbachev’s return from the Kremlin) and that she had more say on them from behind the curtains than was appropriate. In the summer of 1987, she hatched a project to convert the gigantic GUM department store on Red Square into an art museum. Yeltsin and Mayor Saikin were aghast and intervened with central planners to kill the idea.⁵ In one of his interviews with me, Yeltsin said he did not refer to Raisa in his letter or his October disquisition to the Central Committee (see below), but he had talked about her with Gorbachev face to face.⁶ Others confirmed this and said Gorbachev was furious that the question was raised in any form.⁷ When the U.S. ambassador asked Yeltsin in 1989 if he would bring Naina Yeltsina with him on his forthcoming visit to the United States, he said, “No. Absolutely not! I’ll not have her acting like Raisa Maximovna.”⁸ Yeltsin’s grousing about Mrs. Gorbachev was not only about her personally; it also indicates a certain sexism, one that was and is shared by many Russians.

More apropos were the two leaders’ styles and policy positions. To Yeltsin, after their political honeymoon in 1985–86, Gorbachev was vacillating, long-winded, and conceited: “You could not talk of any democracy in the Politburo. After the general secretary’s preamble, everybody was supposed to get up and read out from a little card, ‘Hooray, I agree with everything.’”⁹ Yeltsin had little experience in a collegial decision-making organ he did not head. In Sverdlovsk he was a member of the obkom bureau for only eighteen months before becoming first secretary, and in the Moscow city committee he was in the chair from the start. For his part, Gorbachev thought Yeltsin was playing the prima donna, and in mid-1986 he instructed the editor-in-chief of Pravda, Viktor Afanas’ev, to mute coverage of him in the paper.¹⁰ Gorbachev also thought Yeltsin was overstrung and that he was running scared when his intense tactics in Moscow did not bring results. It was generally believed when Yeltsin was made capital-city boss, and it was his expectation, too, that he would be a full member of the CPSU Politburo, with voting rights, as Viktor Grishin had been from 1971 to 1986.¹¹ He was hurt when Gorbachev refused to make it happen. Gorbachev was to concede in his memoirs that Yeltsin had reason to feel affronted, as there were still “mastodons and dinosaurs” from the Brezhnev era on the bureau. ¹² And there were those who passed Yeltsin by. Of the three individuals promoted to full member of the Politburo in June 1987, one had been a candidate member for the same amount of time as Yeltsin, the second had spent less time than he as a candidate, and the third overleaped the candidate stage altogether. Ligachëv, whom Yeltsin more and more saw as a mastodon, has maintained that Yeltsin at some point in 1987 expressed anger directly to the voting members of the Politburo that the Grishin precedent had not been applied. Yeltsin retired from the room, and Ligachëv said he was categorically against such a promotion and would resign if Gorbachev made it. Gorbachev did not make it.¹³

On the nitty-gritty of within-system reform and its prospects, the perceptions of Yeltsin and Gorbachev came to vary. In retrospect, Yeltsin made it sound like a neat breach, where he questioned Gorbachev’s scheme for turning the country and the regime around and Gorbachev stayed with the tried and true: “Despite what seemed to be changes for the better, despite the upsurge of emotion that was roiling the whole country, I sensed that we were running up against a brick wall. The thing was, this time we could not get away with pretty new phrases about perestroika and renewal. We needed concrete actions, new steps forward, but Gorbachev did not want to take such steps.”¹⁴ At the time, the break was messier and more tentative than this passage implies, and more discomfiting to those on the ground. Yeltsin was to tell the Politburo in October 1987 that he first grew disconcerted in the summer of 1986. However, there were few public or semipublic clues of it until 1987, and it took most of 1987 for his mood to work itself out.