Yeltsin полностью

Other candidates hopped on the bandwagon. The thirty-five-year-old Sergei Stankevich, a historian specializing in the U.S. Congress who was in a neck-and-neck race in the Cherëmushkii area of Moscow, sent Yeltsin a telegram of endorsement and then photocopied it and used it as an advertisement for himself. Twenty-six other liberal candidates, mostly professors, scientists, and literati, did the same. Some distributed pictures of themselves shaking hands with Yeltsin. Stankevich, who had organized a pro-Yeltsin demonstration at a Moscow subway stop in November 1987, could not because he had never met him.⁵⁸ Across the city, “The main orienting points . . . were opposition to all the bosses and support for everyone who was for Yeltsin. All candidates with a lower rank than their main opponents did everything they could to emphasize their ordinariness, almost as if it were a nobleman’s title, and all who had the slightest basis for doing so played up their nearness to Yeltsin.”⁵⁹

Yeltsin glided home in District No. 1 with 89 percent of the popular vote on March 26—5,117,745 out of 5,736,470 votes cast, with little variation across districts. Since Moscow had 1.1 million CPSU members and Brakov’s take was less than 400,000, Yeltsin netted the ballots of most of Moscow’s communists, to say nothing of noncommunists. Even in neighborhoods peopled by high-ranking party workers and bureaucrats, Brakov did not rise above 30 percent.⁶⁰ Intimates of Gorbachev told the American ambassador, Jack Matlock, they had been sure Yeltsin would win but were “astonished by how much.”⁶¹ Yeltsin’s personal absolution and his drubbing of the nomenklatura candidate stole headlines from the change in institutions and political process represented by the holding of a semifree election. Candidates who had put their names on the Stankevich telegram polled 20 percentage points more on average than candidates who did not. First Secretary Lev Zaikov, like Gorbachev, took election as part of the Central Committee hundred rather than try his chances in a Moscow district. Second Secretary Yurii Prokof’ev ran in a district and was trounced, with 13 percent of the votes; Valerii Saikin, the mayor, got 42 percent in his district and pulled out of the runoff that was required when no one had secured a majority in the first lap.

In a lucid election postmortem, Tret’yakov reported how Yeltsin’s win made explicit every one of the implicit lessons of October–November 1987. People were connecting the dots:

Many people identify with Yeltsin. He is a victim of the higher-ups. Who of us has not been in the same position? And he is being slighted for refusing to seek their approval. Who has not dreamt of doing this? The main thing is that he speaks with everyone, with those below and those above, in the same way and as an equal, breaking the hierarchical barriers that everyone, especially below, is sick of.

Even his detractors, Tret’yakov continued, “never tire of reiterating his positive features,” and Yeltsin came across as “contradictory but likeable in a human way even in his gaffes and inconsistencies.” Most important were the mass perceptions of the gravitas that accrued to Yeltsin from his background in the governing elite:

A hallmark of the Yeltsin phenomenon is his relations with the apparatus. This phenomenon could have sprung up only inside the apparatus because until now the apparatus has been the real and stable part of power, and people need stability. But the stability and strength of officialdom annoy people and restrict their freedom. Therefore, their sympathies go to the one who shakes up this apparatus. However, so far any serious revamping of the apparatus will be feasible only if it comes from someone who himself constitutes part of it and is thence a credible force. The circle closes and the Yeltsin phenomenon moves in this circle. I am sure that, had Yeltsin run for the post of director of some research institute or factory, his success could not have been guaranteed. On March 26, 1989, Yeltsin was voted in by a lopsided majority not as “boss for the people” but as “boss for the bosses.” The oneness in voting for Yeltsin is the people’s retort to the apparatus for its high-handed omnipotence.

Tret’yakov prognosticated that the groundswell would persist as long as the regime showed itself incapable of making improvements. “Even Yeltsin’s failures will be blamed not on him but on the [Soviet] administrative-command system and on his critics.”⁶²