The nadir for Yeltsin was the city party plenum called by Gorbachev and Ligachëv for the evening of Wednesday, November 11. Gorbachev phoned him in his TsKB room that morning to tell him KGB officers would come for him. He cut short Yeltsin’s protestations that he was too ill even to walk unassisted to the toilet; the doctors would help, Gorbachev retorted. Only at this stage did the general secretary canvass Yevgenii Chazov, by this time the Soviet minister of health, who warned him that participation in any public meeting would be a danger to Yeltsin’s health; Gorbachev replied that the matter was settled and Yeltsin had given his agreement.74 Naina was in her husband’s room when the guards arrived at Michurin Prospect, and she wanted him to refuse to cooperate. He disagreed because he still hoped against hope that some would side with him, and even that he might win a vote of confidence, and because he was afraid that not to go would be taken as cowardice and would leave pro-Yeltsin members of the Moscow bureau in the lurch. Yeltsin feared a replay of the post–World War II Leningrad affair, when the leadership of the USSR’s second city was decapitated on Stalin’s orders. Until he mentioned this to Naina, she had urged him to stay in the hospital, “And then there was nothing I could do.”75 In light of later events, it is of note that one of Stalin’s accusations against the Leningraders in 1949–50 was that they were scheming to set the Russian republic against the central government.76
Yeltsin arrived at Old Square bandaged, his face and lips of a violet color, and dazed by the medication. Aleksandr Korzhakov and Chazov both write in their books that he had received a potent shot of baralgin, an analgesic and antispasm agent. He felt so poorly, Yeltsin was to say in 2000, “that it seemed like I would die right there, in the meeting hall.”77 KGB officers had roped off the first three rows of the gorkom’s auditorium. Pre-selected speakers filed in and filled up the seats—“flushed, quaking, like borzois [Russian wolfhounds] before the hunt.”78 In his introduction to the meeting, Gorbachev said his erstwhile protégé had taken “an exclusive position” on political issues and “put his personal ambitions above the interests of the party.” Yeltsin’s October speech “did not contain a single constructive suggestion” and showed he had forfeited the party’s trust.79
Twenty-three borzois then subjected Yeltsin to yet another round-robin hazing. No one from the bureau or the parent city committee, not Mayor Saikin or any of the party secretaries, emitted a benevolent peep, which cut Yeltsin to the quick. A select few were temperate. Alla Nizovtseva, a secretary of the gorkom, said she had met many times with the first secretary and never heard him say anything unfaithful. But he had swerved off the rails, and they had not seen it coming: “We really deluded ourselves, we . . . overestimated his savvy and knowledge.”80 One brave soul, cosmonaut Aleksei Yeliseyev, now the rector of the Bauman Technical University, flayed committee members for coming out against Yeltsin only when it was politically convenient and for denying responsibility for his errors. Most of the other speakers would not take any of the blame.
