Yeltsin полностью

The censors decreed a media blackout on these events, and Kremlin agitprop was able to circulate an airbrushed account of the affair. But word of the petitions and demonstrations, and rumors of what Yeltsin had said to the Central Committee, spread like wildfire through the Moscow political underground and the foreign media. One of the more cockeyed simulations of the speech was prepared by Mikhail Poltoranin of Moskovskaya pravda. He was about to be dismissed as editor, but before he was, the Secretariat directed him to speak to 700 personnel from the Soviet local press gathered in a Central Committee academy in Moscow. The newspapermen wanted to know what Yeltsin had actually said to the October plenum, which Poltoranin was not of the rank to have attended. In his apartment that night, he pecked out on his typewriter an apocryphal speech—the one he would have wanted Yeltsin to make. Knowing how unloved Raisa Gorbacheva was, he put into Yeltsin’s mouth words about how she had telephoned him with peremptory instructions on party business. Poltoranin ran off several hundred copies and distributed them the next day without anyone stopping him.⁵

Gorbachev would have done well to release the transcript of the plenum. His more enlightened advisers held that declassification would confute the untruths being told about it and that news about Yeltsin’s disjointed performance would be unflattering to him. To stonewall, they said, would put the nimbus of “a martyr for justice” around his head.⁶ The original secret speech by Khrushchev, circulated in redacted form to party members in 1956, was not published in full in the USSR until 1989. Gorbachev moved more quickly than that, but not quickly enough. It took until March of 1989 for the plenum transcript to appear on the page.

Draconian measures against Yeltsin were not feasible at a time when Gorbachev was liberalizing the Soviet system. Criminal proceedings were out of the question. Yeltsin had parliamentary immunity as a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet. This never stopped Stalin’s OGPU or NKVD, but for a deputy to be arrested in 1987, the Soviet would have had to vote to lift the exemption and spark a national and international furor.⁷ And glasnost would have been no panacea. The unvarnished truth would only verify that in-house foes of reform existed, that Gorbachev was hugging the political center, and that Yeltsin had a more forward posture and was waylaid for it. And full disclosure of the context would have shown that Yeltsin’s diagnosis of perestroika was onto something—that the Soviet economy and society were deteriorating. Petroleum production of the USSR had gone into decline in 1985, petrodollars from exports were sharply down (mostly due to a dropoff in world oil prices), and the finances of the government were under strain more than since the 1940s.⁸ In the teeth of this, the firing of Yeltsin and even his penance, which most would have assumed was offered under duress, made him a magnet for popular discontent. “In the Russian tradition,” as one former Soviet publicist was to write of him, “the aggrieved mutineer earns the sympathy and benevolence of the common people.”⁹

The great Cossack mutineers of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, Stenka Razin and Yemel’yan Pugachëv, paid for their impudence with their heads.¹⁰ This twentieth-century mutineer kept his. The executioner’s axe and the Gulag being unavailable, what was Gorbachev going to do with him?