The gatecrashing paid off. To the 5,000 conferees, Yeltsin gave a feisty fifteen-minute speech that he had massaged for weeks. Excerpts were broadcast on Soviet television, and it was published in the press. It contained no jabs at Gorbachev and few words about Yegor Ligachëv, with whom he said he had tactical differences only. But his wad of accusations got larger, as he added the need for transparency in the party’s finances and for a downsizing of the apparatus. Yeltsin was more recalcitrant than in 1987 on the issues of mass benefit from reform and the privileges of the well-fed Soviet elite. Perestroika had been configured “under the hypnosis of words” and had “not resolved any of the tangible, real problems of people”; to go on this way was to “risk losing grip on the steering wheel and on political stability.” On elitist patterns, where he had previously limited himself to those counter to party norms, he now hacked away at the norms per se. Communists’ monthly dues, he observed, paid for food packets for “the starving nomenklatura” and for “luxurious residences, dachas, and sanatoriums of such an amplitude that you are ashamed when the representatives of foreign parties visit.” All political initiatives, said Yeltsin, ought to be discussed without preconceptions and put to national referendums. The CPSU general secretary, the Politburo, and party officers down the line should be elected by the rank-and-file, restricted to two terms in office, and retired at sixty-five.28
About October 1987, Yeltsin was obdurate. He demanded restitution, contrasting that to the posthumous amends being made to people purged by Stalin decades before:
Comrade delegates, rehabilitation after fifty years has become the norm, and this has a healthy effect on our society. But I am requesting my political rehabilitation while I am alive. I consider this a question of principle. . . . You all know that my speech to the October plenum of the Central Committee was found to be “politically erroneous.” But the questions I brought up at the plenum have since that time been raised repeatedly in the press and by communists. Here virtually all of these questions have sounded in the reports and speeches given from the tribune. I consider the only error in my presentation to have been that I spoke out at an inopportune time, right before the seventieth anniversary of October 1917. . . . We all have to master the rules of political discussion, to tolerate opponents, as Lenin did, and not rush to hang labels on them or to brand them heretics.
In one swoop, Yeltsin had publicly affiliated himself with diversification of the political system and justice for the ghosts of the Soviet past—and had tarred Gorbachev and those who laid him low in 1987 with intolerance and rigidity. As Vitalii Tret’yakov was to put it, “These two words, ‘political rehabilitation,’ intuitively found by Yeltsin, were a godsend—a wondrous public-relations move, we would say today, one that a thousand first-class political technologists and image makers would never have come up with.”29
After Yeltsin left the stage, every second speaker roasted him. Most had been put up to it by Lev Zaikov and the Moscow party staff, who assumed that Yeltsin would find a way to get to the microphone. Ligachëv, whom some of Gorbachev’s men tried to dissuade from speaking, was the most vituperative, maximizing their differences and saying he and Yeltsin diverged not only in tactics but in strategy. “Boris, you
For the Yeltsin story, the striking thing about the conference was the entrenchment of the political cleavage opened up by his secret speech in October 1987. The party did not rehabilitate its freelancer. Beyond the crenellated Kremlin walls, Lev Sukhanov said, he had achieved “the popular acclaim any politician can only dream about.”31
