Yeltsin полностью

Yeltsin did not see it this way at first. He once again felt sorry for himself over the invective by Ligachëv and the conservatives: “A feeling of apathy washed over me. I did not want struggle, not explanations, not anything. All I wanted was to forget it all and be left in peace.” The heartsickness lasted only a few weeks. He was cheered up by the thousands of letters and telegrams that arrived from all over the Soviet Union. The subject matter of most of them was not any particular political line but, says Yeltsin, compassion for him as having been mistreated. Through these communications from afar, people “stretched out their hands to me, and I was able to lean on them and get back on my feet.”³² Yeltsin’s dislike of elite privilege did not keep him from leaving for vacation at a government rest house in Jurmala, Latvia. When he returned, citizens began showing up in droves to see him. Batalin had a reception area installed near the Gosstroi checkpoint where those not admitted to his office could write out questions for him.³³

The new Yeltsin was sought after by other agents of change. In August 1988, for example, he agreed to join the supervisory board of the Memorial Society, the new nongovernmental organization for promoting construction of a monument in Moscow to the millions imprisoned and murdered under Stalin. He was chosen for this honor on write-in ballots by readers of the newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta and the magazine Ogonëk. These publications were favorites of the Russian intelligentsia, with whom Yeltsin had few connections.³⁴ Yeltsin was also seeing how reporters and editors could be allies. Jonathan Sanders, a Moscow producer for CBS News, arranged several Yeltsin interviews and decided to buy him a red-striped Brooks Brothers necktie while on home leave in New York. He spotted Yeltsin walking down the Gosstroi steps, explained that he had to be punctilious about giving a politician a present, but handed him the tie anyway. Yeltsin put it on admiringly and wrapped his own tie around Sanders’s neck, turning the scene into an exchange of tokens of respect.³⁵ An invitation by students to answer questions at the Higher Komsomol School on November 12, 1988, gave him further scope. Shortly after the session, Sukhanov found a counterfeit transcript of Yeltsin’s remarks for sale on Arbat Street. “I showed him this ‘commercial copy’ and he asked, ‘Why have we not made our own transcript ?’ A very good question. So he put his daughters Tanya and Lena to work and they typed up a tape of the session that Sasha Korzhakov had made.” Twelve carbon copies were distributed through informal networks. Cooperative journalists used every trick in the book to get the text published. In the Perm youth paper, they got the editor to agree by giving it the title “Politician or Roughneck?”³⁶

Yeltsin was increasingly willing to moor his critique in unblinking views of the Soviet past. Russians, he said to the Komsomol students, were submissive because they learned to be that way from “parasitic” party and state structures that monopolized power, hid behind a veil of secrecy, and taught individuals to make “a ritual of the bearing of sacrifices” at every turn. It all went back to a history in which one cannot help see the experience of the Urals and of the Yeltsin family: “First the people were forced to put on the altar an inhuman agricultural policy [collectivization], then they were required to give up such timeless values as spirituality and culture, and finally they were divested of the ability to define their goals self-reliantly [samostoyatel’no] and to go about attaining them self-reliantly.”³⁷