Moscow, December 25, 1991

Politburo members, accustomed to diktat rather than dialogue, fretted about Yeltsin’s populist forays around Moscow. In mid-1986 Gorbachev personally instructed Viktor Afanasyev, the editor of the party newspaper, Pravda, to downplay coverage of the publicity-seeking Yeltsin.⁵ At his urging the propaganda section of the Central Committee called in Mikhail Poltoranin, editor of the Moscow party newspaper, Moskovskaya Pravda, to dress him down for giving Yeltsin too much attention.⁶ In those days the party could have editors fired. Though Gorbachev occasionally spoke up in Yeltsin’s defense, acknowledging that he was clearing the capital of “dirt and crooks,” he distanced himself from the Sverdlovsk “stormer.” So too did Yeltsin’s mentor, Yegor Ligachev, who did not like the way he was pushing party officials around. When Yeltsin shut down some special shops in Moscow, Ligachev lectured him for not making regular stores more efficient.

Resentment of Yeltsin among his comrades erupted in a confrontation on January 19, 1987, at a regular Thursday gathering of the Politburo in the Kremlin. Gorbachev was outlining an important speech he planned to make to the Central Committee on the next stage of reform. The content had been worked out privately in advance, as was usually the case. No one was expected to open their mouth at his presentation. But Yeltsin insisted on making a bellicose critique, raising about twenty comments on the text. In particular he challenged Gorbachev’s assertion that the system was capable of renewal.

“The guarantees enumerated, the socialist system, the Soviet people, the party, have been around for all of seventy years,” he said. “So none of them is a guarantee against a return to the past.” Yeltsin also urged Gorbachev to publicly name past Soviet leaders who were responsible for the country’s stagnation, and he demanded a limit on the general secretary’s term in office.

He had, he would later assert, become contemptuous of Gorbachev’s “selfdelusions,” his alleged fondness for the perks of office, and his tolerance for officials continuing to live opulent lives during perestroika.

Gorbachev was livid. His prepared critique of the shortcomings of Soviet rule was already as severe as the party members could swallow. Furious, he got up and stalked out of the room. For thirty minutes the entire Politburo sat in silence, avoiding Yeltsin’s eye.

The general secretary of the Communist Party had worked hard to get agreement from individual Politburo members on the propositions for reform in his speech. He considered the initiatives vital to his task of turning the ship of state around slowly and carefully without running it onto the rocks. He had taken risks with hard-liners by loosening party control. He had eased the suppression of religion and set free scores of political prisoners. Just a month previously he had released the exiled Nobel Prize—winning scientist and dissident Andrey Sakharov from internal exile in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). Editors were being allowed to hint at the truth about the terrors of the Stalin period and to fill in the “blank pages” of Soviet history. He was winding down the war in Afghanistan. He was about to announce the most radical reform in seventy years of totalitarian communism, the introduction of a form of managed democracy that would enable direct elections to a Congress of People’s Deputies. He was doing this in the face of widespread resistance to perestroika by party apparatchiks who saw their sinecures threatened.

And here was this disrespectful braggart from Sverdlovsk accusing him of maintaining the old ways.

When he came back to the room, Gorbachev let fly at Yeltsin in a sustained harangue that lasted more than thirty minutes. Yeltsin’s reproofs were “loud and vacuous,” he cried angrily. He never did anything but offer destructive criticism, and many people in Moscow were complaining about his “rudeness, lack of objectivity, and even cruelty.” According to Yeltsin it was “a tirade that had nothing to do with the substance of my comments, but was aimed at me personally,” with the general secretary swearing at him in “almost market porter’s language.”

The tough construction engineer and scourge of Moscow’s party hacks was crushed by Gorbachev’s furious response. When the lecture was over, Yeltsin apologized lamely, saying, “I’ve learned my lesson, and I think that it was not too soon.”

He later reflected, “There can be no doubt that at that moment Gorbachev simply hated me.”

Chapter 6 DECEMBER 25: MIDMORNING