Moscow, December 25, 1991

Gorbachev received the letter next morning at his dacha on the Black Sea, where he was working with aides. It came as a thunderbolt. Nobody in Soviet history had ever resigned voluntarily from the ranks of the Politburo. Chernyaev found him in a state of excitement. “Here, read this!” said the party leader. “What is it?” “Read it! Read it!” Chernyaev took the letter and looked through it. “What should I do with this?” asked Gorbachev. Don’t take precipitate action, advised Chernyaev.⁴ Boldin read the epistle and thought Yeltsin had a point, as “Gorbachev, for whom maneuvering had become a habit, was really taking two steps forward, three to the side and one backward.” ⁵

The general secretary of the Communist Party was confronted with a dilemma. He didn’t like the Moscow dynamo’s “overgrown ambition and lust for power.” Furthermore, a public split in the Politburo could damage the party. At the same time it might strengthen his own hand with the conservatives if they saw how pressure was building up among the most impatient comrades. He called his subordinate in Moscow two days later and begged him, “Wait, Boris, don’t fly off the handle. We’ll work this out.”⁶ He asked Yeltsin to hold off on his resignation and keep working for another two months, until after the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution (which, because of a later change in the Russian calendar, fell on November 7), when Moscow would be celebrating and the city would be full of foreign dignitaries. Chernyaev recalled his chief saying, “I managed to talk him into it. We agreed that he won’t have an attack of nerves and rush around until after the celebrations.”

Yeltsin remembered the conversation differently. He believed Gorbachev had promised to respond to his letter when he came back from his vacation a few days afterwards. When weeks passed and nothing was said, he figured Gorbachev was quietly planning to make a show of him at a plenum of the Central Committee scheduled for October 21, 1987. This had been convened to hear the text of a groundbreaking speech on Soviet history that the general secretary was working on to commemorate the revolution.

The three hundred members of the Central Committee converged on a raindrenched Kremlin early that day without any sense that a blowup was imminent. They stepped out of their Zils and Chaikas and hurried into the eighteenth century Senate Building. The comrades assembled in St. Catherine Hall, then known as Sverdlov Hall, named after Yakov Sverdlov, the Bolshevik leader who supervised the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Here, in rows of ornate chairs beneath the stony gaze of eighteen prerevolutionary poets portrayed in bas-relief among the white Corinthian columns and pilasters high above, they awaited the single item on the agenda: Gorbachev reading his prepared speech. The fourteen Politburo members sat in a line behind a desk on a raised podium, facing the assembly.

Yeltsin took his place in the front row along with the half dozen other Politburo candidate members and various senior party officials. The meeting was closed to the media. By convention the advance speeches of the general secretary would be approved by acclamation, and everyone would retire to enjoy a pleasant lunch.

Ligachev presided. He called on Gorbachev to speak. The general secretary outlined his presentation. After thirty minutes he finished, and Ligachev asked, “If there are no questions… ?” Yeltsin hesitantly raised his hand, then took it down, as if he were of two minds. Gorbachev pointed him out to Ligachev, who asked if members wanted to open debate on the speech. There were cries of “No!” Slowly the big man from Sverdlovsk stood up, his intuition to speak out winning out over the pressure to conform. Ligachev signaled to him to sit down. But Gorbachev intervened. He would give Yeltsin enough rope to hang himself. “I believe Boris Nikolayevich wishes to say something,” he remarked icily.⁷

Yeltsin seemed nervous and ill prepared. He spoke for about seven minutes in a disjointed fashion, using notes jotted hastily on his voting card. Nevertheless, the thrust of his argument was clear. The promise of perestroika was raising unrealistic expectations that could give rise to disenchantment and bitterness. He was deeply troubled by “a noticeable increase in what I can only call adulation of the general secretary by certain full members of the Politburo. I regard this as impermissible…. This tendency to adulation is absolutely unacceptable…. A taste for adulation, which can gradually become the norm again, can become a cult of personality. We cannot permit this.” Besides, the opposition to him from Comrade Ligachev was such that he must resign from the Politburo, he said. As for his leadership of the Moscow Communist Party, “that of course will be decided by a plenum of the city committee of that party.”