Yeltsin полностью

Ligachëv led off by demanding to know why Yeltsin had been unengaged at many Politburo meetings; the answer must be that all along Yeltsin had knavishly been collecting materials for use in his speech to the plenum.⁶⁰ If Ligachëv’s venom was predictable, some blows smarted more—they were acts of “betrayal,” Yeltsin later said.⁶¹ They came from several provincial party bosses, from Yakov Ryabov, and from Politburo members Ryzhkov and Yakovlev. Boris Konoplëv, the first secretary in Perm oblast, where Yeltsin grew up, wrote Yeltsin’s presentation off to “either cluelessness about life or an effort to shove us aside and distort reality.” Ryabov, sponsor to Yeltsin in Sverdlovsk in the 1960s and 1970s and now ambassador to France, said he should never have drafted him into the party apparatus and promoted him, and ought to have been awake to his “delusions of grandeur.”⁶² Ryzhkov parroted Ligachëv’s charges and added ones of his own about “political nihilism” and a desire to split the Politburo. Yakovlev found that Yeltsin had displayed panic, “petit-bourgeois attitudes,” and an infatuation with “pseudo-revolutionary phrases.” Mikhail Solomentsev, a backer in 1985, faulted him for a tendency to accumulate hostilities the way a snowball does bits of gravel. Vorotnikov, also an early supporter, saw it differently: “At Politburo sessions, Boris Nikolayevich, you mostly keep to yourself. There is some kind of mask on your face the whole time. It was not that way when you were in Sverdlovsk. . . . You seem to feel malcontent with everyone and everything.” Chebrikov of the KGB reproved the sinner for never having “loved the people of Moscow” and for blabbing to foreign journalists.⁶³

Shooting through the proceedings was paternalistic and pedagogical imagery. When Yeltsin toward the end tried a hangdog rebuttal, Gorbachev interrupted midsentence: “Boris Nikolayevich, are you so politically illiterate [bezgramotnyi] that we should be organizing a reading and writing class for you right here?” No, Yeltsin gulped. Gorbachev then pontificated on Yeltsin’s “hypertrophied self-love” and puerile need to have the country “revolve around your persona,” as the city had since 1985. Several accusers said Yeltsin would do well to think of the plenum and similar conclaves as a rectifying “school” for his “political immaturity [nezrelost’].” Shevardnadze, after Yakovlev the most liberal member of the Politburo, inveighed against his “irresponsibility” and “primitivism.” Stepan Shalayev, the chairman of the Soviet trade unions, said Yeltsin should have been heedful of Ligachëv, whose apparatus was “a great school for each communist who takes part in its work,” a point also taken up by Ryzhkov. Yeltsin dawdled in enlisting in the party in the 1960s, stated Sergei Manyakin, and never was tempered as a communist and citizen; Ligachëv had erred in coddling Yeltsin and not “thumping the table with his fist” at Yeltsin’s roguery.⁶⁴

Yeltsin got with the spirit in his closing by describing the plenary as “a severe school . . . that will do me for my whole life.” He tried gamely to recycle several of his propositions in conciliatory form, saying, for instance, that his barb about hosannas to Gorbachev applied to only “two or three comrades.” And he allowed that he generally agreed with the assessment of him: “In speaking out today and letting down the Central Committee and the Moscow city organization, I made a mistake.” Gorbachev then asked if Yeltsin was capable of continuing with his work—a giveaway that he was open to a rapprochement, provided Yeltsin ate his words. Yeltsin would not and said again he wanted to be discharged. In his wrap-up, Gorbachev retracted the lifeline and moved that Yeltsin be censured for his “politically erroneous” outburst and that the Politburo and the Moscow committee meet to examine his status.⁶⁵ Yeltsin, like everyone else, voted for the resolution.

There was still time to salvage something from the debacle. The Moscow party bureau met several days later, excoriated Yeltsin for putting them on the spot by speaking out without consultation, but passed a resolution that he should be permitted to stay as gorkom first secretary. They delegated the estimable Saikin to press this position with Gorbachev, yet the general secretary considered the case closed and would not meet with him. Yeltsin attended the Politburo meeting of October 31 and again asked pardon for his conduct ten days before. He informed members he would agree to the Moscow bureau’s proposal that he remain in his local position—an initiative that went unmentioned in his memoirs: