I am suffering keenly from the criticism of my presentation to the [Central Committee] plenum. The reason for my statement was my worry that perestroika had gained momentum and now we are losing that momentum. I am prepared to continue to work. We need to hold course on perestroika. I confess that I took too much upon myself, that I am guilty [in this regard]. I had still not seen or really felt what I was guilty of. Since the middle of 1986, I have felt a powerful psychological overload. I should have gone openly with this to my comrades on the gorkom and Politburo. But my self-love interposed, and that was my main mistake. I am now ready to speak with Yegor Kuz’mich [Ligachëv], Aleksandr Nikolayevich [Yakovlev], and Georgii Petrovich [Razumovskii, a deputy of Ligachëv’s]. My gorkom comrades have not turned away from me. They are asking me to stay, although they also condemn my speech.
Gorbachev listened impassively.66
On November 3 Yeltsin sent the general secretary a letter repeating his request. Gorbachev consulted with several Politburo members and called him at work to turn it down summarily. He was fed up with indulging Yeltsin and now had a new plaint: Yeltsin had not disavowed bastard versions of his October 21 speech that were popping up in Moscow and in the world press. “He [Yeltsin] ostensibly perceives himself a ‘popular hero,’” the general secretary exclaimed to staff.67 The underlying worry was that Yeltsin’s conceit was shared by the crowd.
It is mind-boggling how close the two gladiators came to a compromise. On October 21, even after Yeltsin refused to withdraw his resignation request, Gorbachev said to the plenum that the position of Moscow party chief might not be “beyond his powers” in the long term, if Yeltsin were “able to draw the correct conclusions” and work well.68 Yeltsin did eat humble pie on October 31 and November 3. As late as November 10, Anatolii Chernyayev was recommending to Gorbachev in a letter that he conserve Yeltsin as an ally, in a manifestation of magnanimity and reformism, and not drive him into the ranks of the outcast.69 Yeltsin could have been left in the Moscow position with a slap on the wrist—not a kick in the groin. And he could have been wheedled into signing a nonaggression pact that would take him out of the Politburo, something he had wanted since September, with eligibility for a return. Had this been done, as Yeltsin theorized in an interview in 2002, “History might have veered in a different direction.”70
On November 7, the anniversary of the revolution, Yeltsin was on the Lenin Mausoleum reviewing stand with the other Soviet leaders, waving at the tanks and rockets in the military parade. Fidel Castro of Cuba, who admired his spunk (and later was to despise his policies), came up and gave him a rib-crunching hug. At the Kremlin reception for the diplomatic corps, Yeltsin, U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock wrote, stood apart from his Politburo colleagues, “bore a rather sheepish smile, and periodically shifted his stance from one foot to the other, rather like a schoolboy who had been scolded by the teacher.”71
During the holiday—reading by now off of a primordial script for survival—Yeltsin got the family together to ponder his plight. Would he get work in industry, be rusticated to Sverdlovsk, or worse? His distress took a morbid turn on November 9. He was found dripping in blood in the dressing room off of his Old Square office and whisked by ambulance to the TsKB (Central Clinical Hospital, the main Kremlin hospital) on Michurin Prospect. He had slashed the left side of his rib cage and stomach with office scissors. The weapon chosen and the injury, too superficial to require stitches, indicate it was a howl of anger, frustration, and perhaps self-hate rather than an act of suicide. Of his hospitalization, Yeltsin has said no more than that he had “a breakdown”
