Moscow, December 25, 1991

In Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the largest port of the Canary Islands, a Soviet cruise ship docks this Christmas morning. The passengers disembark for a day’s sightseeing. When they return they find that the hammer and sickle on the side of the funnel has been prised off by the Russian crew, and they sail away, citizens of a different country than when they boarded.

Approaching eleven o’clock President Boris Yeltsin leaves his office in the White House and takes the elevator down to the packed hall of the Russian Supreme Soviet. The 252 members of the upper chamber of the Russian Congress of Peoples’ Deputies have been summoned to the chamber to make history. They take their places on polished wooden benches beneath an eggshell-blue ceiling and massive circular chandelier to decide whether or not to approve the final dismemberment of the Soviet Union.

Chapter 7 A BUCKETFUL OF FILTH

Despite Yeltsin’s strenuous efforts, the situation in Moscow did not noticeably improve throughout 1986 and 1987. His replacements in senior posts were often just as corrupt or inefficient as those he fired. “We keep digging to get rid of all this filth, but we still haven’t found the bottom of this black hole,” he complained in a talk with Moscow trade officials. The research institutes ignored his demands for staff reductions. Food continued to rot in railway yards. He worked from 7 a.m. to midnight, his dissatisfaction growing all the while. Arriving home he often sat in the car for several minutes, so exhausted, “I did not have the strength to raise my arm.” ¹

He grew more alienated from his comrades in the Politburo. It rankled with Yeltsin that after nearly two years in charge of Moscow he had still not been elevated to full membership of the Politburo, as his predecessors in the Moscow post had been, and that he was answerable to Yegor Ligachev, who believed that instead of radical change the party’s goal should be the strengthening of the USSR’s brand of socialism. Ligachev, the party puritan, saw him now as a dangerous populist.

After the fractious Politburo meeting of January 1987, Gorbachev began to pointedly shun the awkward Moscow party boss. He did his best to avoid shaking Yeltsin’s hand or speaking with him at the Thursday Politburo sessions. Yeltsin’s attack on party privileges had touched a raw nerve with him. Gorbachev did indeed like to live well. Besides building a palatial Moscow home, he had ordered the construction of an immense and architecturally tasteless summer residence for his exclusive use at Foros on the Black Sea. Even his most devoted aides were uneasy about his extravagant use of state funds. Georgy Shakhnazarov worried that it gave people reason to criticize him for his love of luxury. When he first saw the great mansion, with its glass-enclosed escalator down to the beach, his loyal adviser Anatoly Chernyaev too began to have serious doubts about “the perquisites attending his great historic mission.”²

Yeltsin was a misfit in Gorbachev’s otherwise obedient team. He began voicing opinions that were heretical at the time. In May 1987, when Diane Sawyer, in Moscow for the CBS program 60 Minutes, asked him if Russians thought capitalism worked, he said yes. “Do you?” Sawyer asked. “Of course I do!”³ He did not really know about capitalism then, but he knew that communism was not working, and he was aware of the restless public mood.

Overworked, frustrated, and sulking at being passed over for promotion, Yeltsin decided, on September 10, 1987, to quit the Politburo. The last straw was a lecture from Ligachev at a Politburo meeting for tolerating two small unsanctioned demonstrations on Moscow streets. That evening the Moscow boss told Naina he would not work with “this band” any more. He sat down and wrote a letter of resignation to Gorbachev, who was vacationing on the Black Sea.

In the letter, Yeltsin complained that his Politburo colleagues were indifferent to his problems in Moscow and were giving him the cold shoulder. He could no longer tolerate working for Ligachev, whose methods were “altogether unsystematic and crude.” He accused his comrades of paying lip service to perestroika. “This suits them, and—if you will forgive me saying so, Mikhail Sergeyevich—I believe it suits you too.” He finished the communication by asking to be released from his duties as Moscow party chief and candidate Politburo member.