The novelty of the September document was not the compendium of allegations but the quandary it laid before the Soviet leader. Yeltsin’s undiplomatic request to quit his official posts was certain to cause consternation. The letter only magnified it by telling the general secretary that unnamed officials were shamming agreement with his reforms and blocking them on the sly. Gorbachev, Yeltsin said, had grown inured to the pseudo reformers’ game and was an accomplice in it: “This suits them and, if you will pardon me, Mikhail Sergeyevich, it seems to me [these people] are coming to suit you.” The author was not good at stroking his boss’s ego: “I am an infelicitous person and I know it. I realize it is hard for you to know what to do about me.” If he were to stay in place and nothing else changed, he would be a nuisance, and the problems “will grow and will hobble you in your work.” Most striking for the member of a collective leadership, Yeltsin raised the possibility of taking unilateral action. It was best if Gorbachev dealt with Ligachëv’s obstinacy, one way or the other: “To ‘decode’ all of this would be deleterious if it went public. Only you personally can make a change in the interests of the party.” Between the lines, Yeltsin was asking Gorbachev to throw overboard his second secretary and not Yeltsin, and to speed up reform. The closing sentence of the memorandum was a saber-rattling ultimatum about a widening of the arena of internecine conflict: “I
Gorbachev was troubled enough by the letter to dial Yeltsin from his seaside villa in Pitsunda, Georgia. He agreed to discuss it with Yeltsin in Moscow but wanted the meeting to wait almost two months, until after the November 7 holiday break. Gorbachev’s hauteur was strange. One would have thought he would hasten to fix the problem. It was not every day that a candidate member of the Politburo resigned his position. Gorbachev has maintained that Yeltsin accepted his timing. Yeltsin says they agreed to confer “later,” and he assumed that meant in one or two weeks.36 Yeltsin stewed when Gorbachev did not contact him. He feared that the planned October plenum of the Central Committee, the third of the year, was where Gorbachev was going to take up the question, and that he would be confronted there by a motion from Gorbachev and the voting members of the Politburo to purge him.37 He got intelligence from Poltoranin of
As Yeltsin gave his letter to the courier on September 12, he was to recall, he foresaw two options: “If they ousted me, . . . I would take up independent political activity. . . . If they did not oust me, I would appeal to the plenum of the Central Committee.”39 His upbeat attitude is hard to fathom. Basmanovo or Butka homesteaders and maybe Sverdlovsk civil engineers could forage on their own—the word Yeltsin used for “independent”
