The Central Committee met two or three times a year in Sverdlov Hall, in the eighteenth-century Building No. 1 of the Kremlin. The hall was a magnificent rotunda, ninety feet high and ringed in light Corinthian pillars and pilasters and a narrow gallery above. The plenum of Wednesday, October 21, was billed as a sedate affair. It was to consist of hearing out the Politburo-approved text of Gorbachev’s report commemorating the revolution, which was scheduled for delivery on November 2, and party etiquette prescribed early adjournment without discussion, followed by a pleasant luncheon together. Yeltsin was seated in the front row; only the full members of the Politburo were on the presidium, or presiding panel, which looked down on the Central Committee members, alternates, and guests across a skirted desk. He was unsure until the last about whether to try to speak. At about eleven A.M., as Gorbachev finished up, Yeltsin scribbled a few “theses” on one of the red cards used to register votes at Soviet committees and assemblies. He raised his good, right hand shakily in the air. Stage fright hit and he took it down. Gorbachev pointed him out to Ligachëv, who was chairing. Ligachëv asked the members if they wanted to open discussion of the report; when several said they did not, he motioned to Yeltsin that he would not get to speak. Yeltsin took to his feet and was again repelled by Ligachëv. Gorbachev interjected a second time: “Comrade Yeltsin has some kind of announcement.” Only then did Ligachëv surrender the microphone.
Why ever did Gorbachev override Ligachëv? He had to know Yeltsin was up to no good. The circumstances prompt the surmise that the general secretary thought he would kill two birds with one stone by letting the Moscow boss have the floor. One benefit would be to apply pressure on the party to get with the program of reform, on the rationale that incremental change was to be preferred to the shocks favored by Yeltsin. The other potential advantage was the chance for Gorbachev and his followers in the Central Committee to reply to and chasten the hotheadedness of Yeltsin, which could have led to further sanctions.42 Like Yeltsin’s decision to speak out, Gorbachev’s decision to allow him to speak carried its own heavy risks.
No drumroll announced Yeltsin’s cri de coeur. In Vitalii Vorotnikov’s words, he “strode up onto the dais. Clearly agitated, he took a pause and began to speak. He talked at first confusedly and then with more assurance, but without his usual force. Somehow, he was semi-apologetic and semiaccusatory, trying continuously to contain his passions.”43 Gorbachev remembers in his memoirs a similarly “strange composite” of feelings on Yeltsin’s face. The combination, he says in one of his off-the-shelf digs at Yeltsin, was what you got from “an unbalanced nature.”44
Yeltsin’s nine hundred words—his secret speech—lasted all of six or seven minutes.45 In form, they will not put anyone in mind of Pericles’ Funeral Oration or the Gettysburg Address or even of the original secret speech by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, with its gripping, four-hour narrative of arrest, torture, and gore under Stalin. Yeltsin gave mostly a rambling rerun of the letter of September 12 and of oral statements at meetings, open and closed.46 Items about Ligachëv and hidebound Soviet bureaucracy tripped out pell-mell. The only concrete anecdote Yeltsin gave of messed-up reform was the workaday one of his inability to cut back on the number of research institutes in Moscow, as he had promised to do in 1986.47
What was lacking in fluency and lawyer’s points Yeltsin made up for in audacity and heat. He wanted “to say everything that is in my soul, what is in my heart, and what is in me as a communist.” He unloaded three bombshells. The first was a sharpened position on how the mass of the population was tuning out the reform process. “People’s faith has begun to ebb.” Unless results were hewed to match promises, “we may well find that the authority of the party as a whole will diminish in the people’s eyes.” Yeltsin made the point clumsily, pushing both a stronger effort to make good on promises and a move away from the two- or three-year period he had spoken of in the Politburo on October 15. The second point was a call for “democratic forms” in Soviet politics, especially in the Communist Party, and disapproval of the growing sycophancy toward Gorbachev, which he said had the ring of a Stalin- or Brezhnev-like personality cult. Political deformations of this sort, Yeltsin asserted, accounted for the failures of the seventy years reviewed in Gorbachev’s report:
