Moscow, December 25, 1991

The relationship cooled after Gorbachev received a critical report on the livestock industry in Sverdlovsk. Yeltsin protested that the report was distorted, but Gorbachev dressed him down anyway. Nevertheless, on Ligachev’s recommendation, Gorbachev sent him an invitation to come to Moscow and head up the Central Committee’s construction department. It meant supervising building projects around the country. But Yeltsin was affronted and declined the offer as too modest. His predecessors as party secretary in Sverdlovsk had been given higher posts when brought to the capital. Only after Ligachev phoned him, on April 4, 1985, and told him it was a matter of party discipline, did he agree to accept. Yeltsin moved to Moscow with his family. He arrived with a chip on his shoulder and inflated expectations. He was also somewhat jealous of Gorbachev, a party official of the same age who had not managed a region as big or important as Sverdlovsk but had been promoted faster.

Yeltsin went to pay his respects to Gorbachev in his fifth-floor office in the Central Committee building in Moscow’s Staraya Ploshchad, or Old Square. It was the practice at the time for Soviet leaders to have their administrative office in this rambling structure near Red Square and to use the Kremlin only for party gatherings and for receiving important guests. The general secretary spoke to Yeltsin from behind an enormous writing table, under the watchful eyes of Lenin in a large portrait on the wall directly above him. Only high-ranking officials could sit beneath Lenin. For lesser bureaucrats the picture had to be placed to one side.⁴

The protocol dispensed with, Yeltsin flung himself into his work as head of the party’s construction department. He traveled around the Soviet Union inspecting major building projects. In Uzbekistan a KGB officer slipped him documents showing that the party boss there, Usman Khodzhaev, was on the take. He brought them to Gorbachev, who—by Yeltsin’s account—blew up and accused him of allowing himself to be fooled. Ligachev himself had vouched for the honesty of the official, he said. But Yeltsin’s source was right. Two years later the Uzbek boss was sacked, tried, and convicted of crimes.

In December 1985, Gorbachev decided that Yeltsin’s bullheadedness and aggressive manner could be put to better use. Moscow needed a thorough cleanup. The capital city, run by the cocksure and grossly inefficient first secretary, Viktor Grishin, was decaying from neglect and mired in corruption. Food supplies rotted in filthy depots. There was widespread graft and cheating and a black market in everything from cabbages to caviar. Many problems had piled up, and Gorbachev believed they needed a large bulldozer to clear the way. Yeltsin met all the requirements. Though blunt and quarrelsome, he was an apparently sincere communist with no connections to corrupt Moscow city officials. The new post also meant that Yeltsin would be elevated to candidate member of the Politburo, thereby satisfying his ambition for rapid promotion.

If he knew what opinions Yeltsin was expressing privately about some of the Communist Party leaders, Gorbachev might have had second thoughts about offering him the post. On a trip back to Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin voiced his contempt for the “old fools” running the show, a term his rather horrified comrades took to mean the most important men in the Politburo, including Ligachev. But it was Ligachev who was most enthusiastic about promoting Yeltsin. He regarded his fellow Siberian as a good, honest, party man with the force of personality to get things done, whether by bullying or storming. As a socialist puritan Ligachev valued hard work in cadres as the ideal way of perfecting the worker-peasant state.

But Soviet prime minister Nikolay Ryzhkov, a dry, practical executive also from Sverdlovsk who knew Yeltsin of old, warned Gorbachev that while he was a builder by profession, Yeltsin was a destroyer by nature. “You’ll have trouble with him,” he said. “I know him, and I would not recommend him.” ⁵

Gorbachev stifled his doubts. On December 23, 1985, the Politburo assigned Yeltsin the post of first secretary of the country’s corrupt capital city, with a mandate to clean it up and get things moving.

Chapter 4 DECEMBER 25: MORNING

Just before 10 a.m. on December 25, 1991, slightly later than usual, Gorbachev’s limousine comes within sight of the Kremlin, the seventy-eight-acre fortress within one and a half miles of crenellated brick walls that has been the seat of communist government since 1918. The last Soviet leader can see the red flag with its hammer and sickle hanging limply in the soft breeze on the mast on top of the Senate Building. He expects it to remain there until the USSR expires at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Then it is due to be replaced by the white, blue, and red flag of independent Russia, with a grand display of fireworks. At least that is what he has been told.