I must say that the lessons that come out of these seventy years are painful lessons. Yes, there have been victories, as Mikhail Sergeyevich has said, but there also have been . . . harsh lessons, serious defeats. These defeats took shape gradually. They happened because there was no collegiality [in the party], because cliques were formed, because the party’s power was delivered into a single pair of hands, because this one man was protected from all criticism.
Myself, I am disturbed that there is still not a good situation within the Politburo and that recently there has been a noticeable growth in what I can only call adulation of the general secretary on the part of certain members of the Politburo, certain members of long standing. This is impermissible now, at a time when we are introducing properly democratic and honorable relations toward one another, true comradely relations. . . . This is impermissible. I am all for criticizing people to their faces, eye-toeye, but not for being carried away by adulation, which can again become the norm, a cult of personality.48
These broadsides landed, Yeltsin’s peroration made his third point—repetition of the request to get him off the Politburo that he had initially made in writing on September 12. It was offered with an addendum that was not in the letter to Gorbachev but was part of his September 10 conversation with Naina: the afterthought that his position as Moscow first secretary should be considered by the city committee of the party and not solely by the Central Committee, which would have made it possible for him to remain Moscow party boss after departing the Politburo. Catcalls rang out when he made the last statement. As he took his seat again, “My heart was pounding and seemed ready to burst out of my chest.”49
Looked at in the sweep of Yeltsin’s life, the soliloquy was an instant of truth. He reflected on it in an interview fifteen years later as lonely and intimidating : “It was an expression of protest. . . . I had a venturesome attitude but no support. . . . I was all alone against this armada, this bulky and cumbersome communist thing, their KGB system.”50 There is some self-dramatization here, and not for the only time, but there is no denying that Yeltsin was tempting fate. Irrespective of the cries from the hall after he spoke that he was consumed by vainglory, the eruption was not the result of naked power-seeking, for, absent something to defuse the situation, retribution was foreordained as soon as he had gone through with it. As Anatolii Chernyayev dryly put it to Gorbachev in early November, Yeltsin “was not aiming for the top spot: He was smart enough not to count on it.”51
Even pushing on Gorbachev to change policy was dicey, given past Soviet practice. Nor was Yeltsin adhering to a well-defined program or set of ideas. His perception that Gorbachev was acting timidly, and that he as a result should recalibrate his position, was grounded more in an almost feline instinct for the moment than in ideology. Gorbachev’s feet were still firmly planted in Marxism-Leninism. Now and over the next four years, inasmuch as he resonated to instincts at all, they were, in a manner of speaking, canine—trained, trainable, tied to the known and to the previously rewarded.52
Once the hunch took with Yeltsin, he acted as he had at times in the past, going beyond survival, duty, success, and testing to revisit the dormant rebellion script. In
