Yeltsin полностью

The tiebreaker for Yeltsin was a microissue in political reform. Gorbachev being away on summer vacation in the south, Ligachëv chaired the Politburo session of September 10, 1987. In the Politburo in early August, following rallies by the Pamyat nationalists and by representatives of the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic minority exiled to Central Asia by Stalin, Yeltsin had promised Gorbachev to consider how to regulate street demonstrations. In a memorandum, he proposed to take a permissive approach to citizens who wished to march and congregate but to limit meetings to Izmailovo Park in the east end, which would become a Moscow Hyde Park. Some guidelines had since been promulgated in the city press.³⁰ On September 10 Ligachëv and other standpat members criticized Yeltsin for not checking back with the Kremlin, and said the document was unnecessary and would invalidate police controls. Yeltsin replied that he had made an effort to clear the decision and that such matters were best left to Moscow and other city councils to legislate. Ligachëv waved him off pedantically. The old, centrally run system, which banned meetings other than official rallies, prevented “harm to society, the state, and other citizens.” “There is no need to pass other ‘rules,’” he stated, “and the document adopted in Moscow is to be repealed.”³¹ A Politburo commission merely tweaked the USSR-wide regulations. They would be redone in a much more liberal direction only in 1988–89.

The rigors of the Moscow party position, and the tugging and hauling with Gorbachev and Ligachëv, wore Yeltsin down. Toward the end of 1986, he checked into a Kremlin clinic with a hypertensive attack and symptoms of anxiety. The doctors concluded that he was overworked and that a principal health issue was that in reaction to the nervous tension he “had begun to abuse sedatives and sleeping pills and to be enamored of alcohol.” The patient reacted cantankerously: He had no intention of curbing his workload and “no need of moral lectures.”³² It is to be noted that individuals who worked closely with Yeltsin in those years, and whom I interviewed, seem to have seen few or no effects of psychological dislocation, overmedication, or overconsumption of alcohol. For instance, Valerii Saikin, the mayor of Moscow from 1986 to 1990 and not well disposed toward Yeltsin, said the first secretary never ran out of energy. He might plead a headache at their planning meetings on Monday mornings and refer jocularly to staying up late to work on his weekly report. Beyond that, Saikin saw nothing out of the ordinary.³³

It was on September 10, the day of the Politburo brouhaha over street marches, that Yeltsin decided to fire off a letter to Gorbachev. He came home late to the Usovo dacha and sat with Naina in his study. He told her he intended to write the general secretary and to get out of the CPSU leadership: “I am not going to work with this band [s etoi bandoi] any longer. They are ruining the country” (the country at this time still being the Soviet Union). She was not surprised at his anger, as she had felt it for months, but was taken aback by the solution he proposed. Where would he work? she asked. Yeltsin said it was possible that Gorbachev would let him continue to run the Moscow party committee, without a Politburo seat, although his formal request was to give up both positions. If not, he would go back to the construction industry, perhaps as chief of a building trust. The party would never let him do that, she replied. Then he would work as a foreman, as he had in the 1950s, or perhaps they would move to the far north and start a new life there. Maybe it would be simpler to go on pension, Naina thought, and let their grown-up children feed them. Then came a pause: “He sat and sat and finally said, ‘No.’ I [Naina Yeltsina] thought the continuation of his thought would be, ‘I am not going to write it.’ But he said, ‘No, I am going to write my statement. And we will just see about work later.’ He did not say a thing after that.”³⁴ He drafted the letter that night and sent it to Gorbachev on Saturday, September 12, after what one must assume was further introspection.

Half of the missive was a swipe at Ligachëv, whom Yeltsin painted as a boor and a hat-throwing partisan of Tomsk. Party committees like Yeltsin’s in Moscow, restrained by Ligachëv and his minions, “are losing their self-reliance [samostoyatel’nost’],” even as the leadership was beginning to ease up on factory and farm directors.³⁵ Yeltsin also underlined “the disparity between revolutionary words and [unrevolutionary] deeds,” as had been a theme of his all year, and notified Gorbachev that people felt the inconsistency but were reticent to talk about it.