Yeltsin полностью

And so it went until October 1987. At some gatherings of the leadership, the archives reveal, Yeltsin and Gorbachev butted heads; at others, Yeltsin kept silent or limited himself to needling. He was, he says, the odd man out or a queer fish (chudak) in the collective.²¹ In the Politburo on March 24, he sniped at the foreign-language “special schools” for the offspring of Moscow VIPs, which drew an answering fusillade from Gorbachev and Ligachëv. On April 23 Gorbachev denounced press articles on limousines, clinics, and other nomenklatura privileges, such as had been printed in the pages of Moskovskaya pravda; Yeltsin replied that reasonable explanations of the privileges, if justified by higher need, had to be given to the media and the people. In Politburo discussions in April and May, Yeltsin gave an equivocal signal in favor of deep economic reform. He supported retention of central planning but composition of the plan “from below,” with slack targets whereby efficient firms, once they had met their output quotas, would hold back surplus production for reuse or sale at unregulated prices. It was a branching out from the “complex brigade” model he had favored in Sverdlovsk. On September 28 Yeltsin proclaimed at a Politburo session that the party had been caught with its head in the sand by the emergence of the neformaly, the extra-governmental, informal organizations, and that the Komsomol was ossified and was proving incapable of offering Soviet youth alternatives to them. “It does nothing itself and only interferes with others.” Mobilization of old-style party propagandists into the youth league, as had been advised, “will bring no results.” And the sputtering economy was turning the population away from perestroika: “We said that in two years there would be an improvement. But there have not been any discernible changes. So questions arise. ‘There was one period when it got better [people say], but once again . . . ’”²²

At the marathon Politburo meeting of October 15, by which time their relations were on the rocks, Gorbachev refuted commentary Yeltsin made on the 120-page draft of his address marking the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7. In Life and Reforms, Gorbachev characterizes Yeltsin’s comments as “saturated by a spirit of great caution and conservatism,” in contrast to his own latitudinarian views.²³ So black-and-white an interpretation is hard to sustain from the archival record.

Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin were unsure about how far to go in revising the Soviet past. In the October 15 discussion, Gorbachev differed from the communist catechism on many issues.²⁴ Yet he defended Stalin’s crushing of Trotskyism and other intraparty opposition groups, his wartime leadership of the fatherland, and “the liquidation of the kulaks as a class” during collectivization, reminiscing here about the organizing efforts of his grandfather in their birthplace of Privol’noye. Yeltsin—from a family of dispossessed kulaks—avoided collectivization and Stalin’s attacks on the opposition and wartime leadership, but spoke on a host of other historical issues. One unifying point for him was the need to recognize the past contribution of rank-and-file citizens and communists. In 1917 the party found out “how to win over the majority of the population and of the soviets [elected councils]” to its side; Germany would not have been defeated in 1945 without the unselfishness of anonymous workers and foot soldiers. Yeltsin asked for elucidation of the role of Lenin and—shades of his adolescent inquiries in Berezniki—for inclusion in the jubilee report of some evaluations of Lenin’s revolutionary contemporaries. Toward the end, he telegraphed irritation at the effort being spent on the past, since what mattered most to society was a decent life in the present. His plea was for a stock taking, a summary in Gorbachev’s speech about the Soviet experiment and the path ahead.

The declassified transcript shows Gorbachev taking to heart the question about the velocity of reform, though not quite as Yeltsin did. On other items, he tut-tutted Yeltsin for artlessness with reference to Lenin and, in Aesopian language, for his self-centeredness:

YELTSIN: I think that besides Lenin we need to name [in the report] his closest comrades-in-arms.

GORBACHEV: Whom do you have in mind?

YELTSIN: I have in mind [Yakov] Sverdlov, [Felix] Dzerzhinsky, [Mikhail] Kalinin, [Mikhail] Frunze.