Some of the vitriol came from officials whom Yeltsin had demoted or dressed down since December 1985. “You have ground everything into dust and ashes,” Vladimir Protopopov, a professor of economics, formerly a raion first secretary, declared, “but when it was time for something creative all you did, Boris Nikolayevich, was stumble around.” Yurii Prokof’ev, a party apparatchik banished to city hall, reminded Yeltsin of his comments to the Twenty-Seventh CPSU Congress in 1986, when he said he had lacked the courage and political experience to speak out before then. “So far as courage goes, you have it, but you have never had political maturity and you do not have it now. The only way to explain that is by reference to your character.” A. N. Nikolayev of Bauman raion stated that Yeltsin had committed “a party crime” and “blasphemy” and “qualified for the same bossman syndrome against which he spoke so angrily at the [1986] party congress.” As an example of the syndrome, A. I. Zemskov from Voroshilov district cited Yeltsin’s inattentiveness to the courtesies Viktor Grishin had been master of: “It is repugnant when not a single raikom [district party committee] secretary . . . has been able to phone the city secretary direct. Over the course of two years, we have had to report to an assistant why the first secretary of a raikom wants to have a word with the first secretary of the gorkom.” Consecutive orators bandied about invidious comparisons: to Napoleon again (“elements of Bonapartism”); to a prancing general on horseback (“on your steed in front of the man on the street”); to Julius Caesar (“‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ is not the motto for us”); even, with a snicker, to Christ (anti-communists “are trying to make out of Boris Nikolayevich a Jesus Christ who has been tortured for his frightfully revolutionary love of social renewal and democracy”). Some of these speakers were later to ask Yeltsin’s pardon,81 but that evening the schadenfreude hung over the hall.
Yeltsin went up to the microphone, Gorbachev holding him by the elbow. As he spoke, communists in the first three rows stamped their feet and hissed “
When the meeting was over and Gorbachev and the audience were gone, Yeltsin, overwrought, put his head down on the presidium table.83 Back at the hospital, Naina exploded that the guards were no better than Nazis—the worst abuse that could be hurtled by a Soviet citizen of her generation—and asked them to tell Gorbachev, whose orders they had carried out, that he was a criminal.84
The resolution of the city committee gave Yeltsin’s position to Lev Zaikov, the blimpish Central Committee secretary for the military-industrial complex, the same job Yakov Ryabov had held in the 1970s. Zaikov, a former mayor of Leningrad, had been appointed a CPSU secretary in July 1985, the same day as Yeltsin, and to the Politburo in February 1986. The morning of November 13,
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Yeltsin Phenomenon
Yeltsin was moved in early December 1987 from the principal Kremlin hospital in the city to the forest calm of the Soviet government’s sanitarium in Barvikha, west of Moscow. He was there through February 1988. His mother visited from Sverdlovsk. Student friends from Urals Polytechnic sent flowers, get-well cards, and one caller a week. Yeltsin depicts the stay in
