When Yeltsin was back in his seat, Gorbachev took control from Ligachëv. He was, noticed Valerii Boldin, his chief of staff, “livid with rage” at the monkey wrench Yeltsin had thrown and at the claim about kowtowing to Gorbachev as general secretary.54 Still, Gorbachev did have options. He could have voiced receptivity and asked Yeltsin to explicate his points. He could have picked some of them apart. Yeltsin had cast aspersions on Gorbachev for exalting palaver over action; the same could have been shown to apply to some degree to Yeltsin’s speech. Or Gorbachev could have finagled the matter by undertaking to review it with Yeltsin or to refer it to the Politburo. That he did not do so is proof that by the time Yeltsin’s speech was over Gorbachev had shifted to giving his uppity associate a dose of his own medicine.
In high dudgeon, Gorbachev rejected Yeltsin’s position that the Moscow party organization should be left to decide on his standing there: “We seem to be talking here about the separation of the Moscow party organization [from the party as a whole] . . . about a desire to fight with the Central Committee.” Under the “democratic centralism” bolted in place by Lenin and Stalin, local and regional leaders served for the good of the whole and bowed to the will of higher-ups. It was anathema for the Moscow committee, and not the Politburo and the Central Committee apparatus, to choose the city’s party boss.55 Gorbachev then solicited opinions, signaling that he had made willingness to berate Yeltsin a badge of loyalty to him.56
Nine Politburo members—Ligachëv, Prime Minister Ryzhkov, Vitalii Vorotnikov, Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia (Gorbachev’s foreign minister), and Viktor Chebrikov (the chairman of the KGB), inter alia—spoke against Yeltsin. All were willing and even happy to oblige, although later Ryzhkov and some others would hold it against Gorbachev that he had not let them in on Yeltsin’s September letter.57 A parade of fifteen officials and two blue-collar workers then had at Yeltsin. It was four hours’ worth of imprecations, with time off for a recess in which Yeltsin stood alone. Some committee members approached Gorbachev at the break to demand that Yeltsin be expelled from the Central Committee; Gorbachev refused.58 Several members long affiliated with Yeltsin, such as Yurii Petrov, his successor in the Sverdlovsk obkom, and Arkadii Vol’skii, who had tried to bring him to Moscow in the Andropov years, did not respond to Gorbachev’s invitation to attack him verbally. Several others, notably Mayor Saikin, Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev, the Sverdlovsker Gennadii Kolbin (now party first secretary in Kazakhstan), and academician Georgii Arbatov, showed some fellow feeling for him even as they got in their digs. Saikin truly stuck his neck out. He was opposed to Yeltsin’s speech and underlined that he had no forewarning of it (he was right off a plane from Beijing), but said there had been some achievements in Moscow since 1985 that Yeltsin had “worked around the clock” to bring about.59 The rest ranged from the admonitory to the abusive. These rejoinders were as new as Yeltsin’s almost unrehearsed piece. Since Stalin’s time, would-be speakers at Central Committee plenums had requested a place on the docket weeks ahead, written out their remarks, and filed them with the Secretariat before meeting day.
