When the talk turned to remedies, Yeltsin was not a flaming militant. Besides his now faddish populism, the pillars of his approach were outspokenness, the need for reform to show results, and support for political competition and inclusiveness. His forté was not the clairvoyant pronouncement but the folksy verbalization of what many others were already thinking and had been subdued from saying in public. Yeltsin, as a Moscow academic was to say after one of his more plain-spoken statements, was giving voice to “what the people have freely talked about for ages” in their kitchens or at their dachas.38 To put it in the more formal language of anthropology, he was a leader in the “discursive deconstruction” of the late Soviet system, taking apart meanings that were increasingly disconnected from reality.39 On the economic and social front, he was for a cooling of the polemics and for brass-tacks improvements in living standards. Although he mentioned a few action steps, such as a hike in the output of consumer goods and building supplies to be funded by cuts to the construction and space budgets, he laid out no general conception of reform. At the Komsomol academy, he held his thoughts on it for his edification alone: “I have stuffed them far down in the archives, in a safe, so that no one sees them.”40 It was a subterfuge his enraptured listeners let him get away with. In a New Year’s interview with newspaperman Pavel Voshchanov, who would be his press secretary in 1991–92, Yeltsin said he wanted to annul the “double privileges” built into the Soviet system, so that a ruble earned by a government minister would buy the same goods and services as a ruble earned by the janitor in the ministry’s headquarters.41 But this was more a design for redressing past abuses than for building a productive and equitable economy.
In the political realm, Yeltsin was for the liberalization of electoral laws enacted after the Nineteenth Conference and fought measures, such as Gorbachev’s provision to have party secretaries chair local councils, that might adulterate the reform. What about the Communist Party and its “leading role”? At the conference in July, Yeltsin favored “socialist pluralism,” Gorbachev’s shorthand for heterogeneity within the ruling party, and came out against a system containing two socialist parties. By late 1988, he was telling his wife over the dinner table that
Coyness about an overt challenge to Gorbachev fooled no one. Yeltsin had by this time traversed the threshold dividing dissidence, or criticism of those in power, from opposition, or activity aimed at gaining power.44 And the general secretary could hear his footfall. “Indubitably,” recalled Georgii Shakhnazarov, “Gorbachev saw in Yeltsin his principal rival for the future. Possessing a low opinion of [Yeltsin’s] intellect and his other qualities, he feared not the person-to-person competition but the very fact of the appearance of a leader of the opposition.”45 Shakhnazarov did not share Gorbachev’s complacency about Yeltsin and repeated the advice to send him to a cushy, faraway embassy and so keep him out of the 1989 national elections. Gorbachev turned a deaf ear.
One of the reasons Yeltsin accepted speaking engagements, and stood on the stage for hours, was to prove that he was out of his sickbed. Of the encounter at the Komsomol school, Sukhanov writes: “In speaking without a gap, he was able to exhibit that he was in good shape physically. He was rumored to be seriously ill, and he did not want to look impotent and pitiable.”46 The students asked how he had handled the slings and arrows of the past year. He answered in high testing mode and educed Russia’s revolutionary past:
