Moscow, December 25, 1991

Unexpectedly Gorbachev offered Yeltsin a chance to undo the damage. “Do you have enough strength to carry on with your job?” he asked. “I can only repeat what I said,” replied Yeltsin, to catcalls. “I still request that I be released.” Gorbachev proposed that he be censured for his politically incorrect tirade. The motion was passed unanimously. Even Yeltsin voted in favor. A few days later he wrote a letter to the general secretary expressing his wish to continue in the job as Moscow party chief. Chernyaev cautioned his boss: “The stakes are high. The supporters of perestroika among the so-called general public are on Yeltsin’s side.” But Gorbachev called his critic on the telephone to say bluntly, “Nyet!”

News of a rupture in the Politburo soon began to leak. Rumors about Yeltsin’s “secret speech” at the Central Committee spread throughout Moscow. Fabricated versions began appearing. One was concocted by his editor friend Mikhail Poltoranin. In this version Yeltsin complained that he had to take instructions from Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, though he had said no such thing. Poltoranin distributed hundreds of copies, and they became part of samizdat, underground literature that the official media would not print. ⁸

On November 7, 1987, the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution, Gorbachev and fellow members of the Politburo welcomed fraternal world leaders in Red Square to watch a military parade of goose-stepping soldiers and tanks belching diesel smoke.

Yeltsin was ignored by his comrades as they lined up on top of the Lenin Mausoleum, but diplomats, correspondents, and foreign visitors could not take their eyes off him. The small revolt in the formidable ranks of Soviet communism was world news. Fidel Castro gave him a big hug, three times, and General Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland embraced him, saying in fluent Russian, “Hang in there, Boris!” At a Kremlin reception for diplomats, American ambassador Jack Matlock noticed Yeltsin standing apart with a rather sheepish smile, shifting his stance from one foot to another, “like a schoolboy who has been scolded by his teacher.” The Moscow party chief smiled at him. The envoy kept his distance. The last thing Yeltsin needed was to be seen conversing with the American ambassador.

Political drama turned to ugly farce. Gorbachev called a meeting of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party for Wednesday, November 11, to confirm Yeltsin’s dismissal as party leader of the capital city. Two days before the meeting, on November 9, Yeltsin apparently tried to kill himself. He was rushed to the special Kremlin hospital on Michurinsky Prospekt on the outskirts of Moscow, bleeding profusely from self-inflicted cuts to his chest. By his account, “I was taken to hospital with a severe bout of headaches and chest pains…. I had suffered a physical breakdown.” At their apartment Naina took the precaution of removing knives, hunting guns, and glass objects, as well as prescription medicines, in preparation for his return.

Gorbachev took the attitude that the Siberian rebel was faking to draw attention to himself and avoid the showdown. “Yeltsin, using office scissors, had simulated an attempt at suicide,” he concluded. “The doctors said that the wound was not critical at all; the scissors, by slipping over his ribs, had left a bloody but superficial wound.” On the morning of the Moscow meeting he telephoned Yeltsin in his hospital room and told him to get dressed and come to the plenum of the Moscow city committee that would decide his future. “I can’t. The doctors won’t even let me get up,” protested Yeltsin. “That’s OK, the doctors will help you,” replied Gorbachev.

Acting on party orders, a Kremlin physician, forty-one-year-old Dmitry Nechayev, gave his patient a strong dose of a pain reliever and antispasm agent called baralgin. He “started to pump me full of sedatives,” recalled Yeltsin. “My head was spinning, my legs were crumpling under me, I could hardly speak because my tongue wouldn’t obey.” Yeltsin decided not to resist. He hoped that someone would speak up for him at the assembly.

Naina objected furiously to the overall head of security for Soviet politicians, General Yury Plekhanov, who was at the hospital, that discharging a sick man amounted to sadism. But Plekhanov answered to a higher authority.

Alexander Korzhakov assisted his charge, dazed, bandaged, and with his face swollen, to a car and drove him the six miles along Leninsky Prospekt and through the city center to Old Square. The setting this time was not the grand rotunda of St. Catherine Hall but the Hall of Meetings, a long, narrow, whitewashed chamber in the Central Committee building. Yeltsin was brought barely conscious to an adjoining room, where the Politburo members had gathered to make an impressive entrance.