Moscow, December 25, 1991

Gradually Yeltsin’s anguish abated. He began to go for walks alone in the street. People who recognized him stopped to smile and shake his hand. Here were the first hints that the long-apathetic masses were becoming politicized and that Yeltsin had acquired a popular base outside the party structures by giving voice to people’s resentments.

The following month it was Yegor Ligachev who overreached. When Gorbachev was on a trip abroad, the party’s number two instructed newspapers to publish a lengthy letter from a Leningrad schoolteacher, Nina Andreyevna, which defended Stalinist values and called for a halt to democratic reforms. Ligachev had sent a team to Leningrad to beef up the letter, and he pushed it as a manifesto of a new party line. No newspaper editor had the courage to refuse publication, though it was clearly a mutiny against perestroika. The country held its breath to see which way things would go.

When Gorbachev returned to Moscow, he and Alexander Yakovlev composed a lengthy response condemning the letter as an attack on his reforms and ordered the editor of Pravda to publish it. The reform policy was seen to be on course again, and the radicals surged back out of the trenches. Gorbachev did not dump Ligachev, but the boneheaded zealot’s influence was diminished.

In the following months newspaper editors became even more daring. Books and plays challenging communist orthodoxy began to appear. The ringing of long-silent church bells was permitted. Informal meetings at Pushkin’s statue in central Moscow were allowed so that disgruntled members of the populace could let off steam. At these ad hoc gatherings the chant of “Yeltsin! Yeltsin!” began to be heard. The former Moscow chief was becoming a lighting rod for discontent.

In his absence, the standard of living had, if anything, deteriorated. A popular anecdote described a dog praising perestroika, saying, “My chain is a little longer, the dish is further away, but I can now bark all I want.” A well-motivated but disastrous antidrinking campaign by the Politburo resulted in an acute shortage of vodka and a collapse in government revenues. Sugar became deficit, as it was bought up to make bootleg spirits called samogon. Gorbachev had promoted the crusade, declaring that communism should not be built on vodka taxes, but Ligachev took it to the point of absurdity, at one point ordering the uprooting of hundred-year-old vines in Crimea. Another anecdote described how an American and a Russian tested the echo on a mountain top. The American shouted “bourbon” and heard the word “bourbon” echo several times. The Russian called out “vodka,” and the echo came back, “Where? Where? Where?”

Yeltsin’s growing street profile and renewed self-confidence intrigued the media at home and abroad. In April Yegor Yakovlev, editor of Moscow News, plucked up the courage to ask Yeltsin to tell the story of how he was drugged and hauled before the Moscow party. They did the interview in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. Yakovlev suggested they take a picture of Yeltsin in his Moskvich parked outside.

In a frolicsome mood, Yeltsin posed at the wheel of the boxy automobile with Korzhakov beside him and Sukhanov in the back, then on a whim he turned the ignition key and started steering the car towards the exit. Knowing how bad a driver he was, his passengers were terrified. “He mixed up the pedals, and it was jumping around like a kangaroo,” recalled Korzhakov. “I swear to God I never felt such fright,” said Sukhanov. “We went through Manezh Square and past the Exhibition Hall. We were trying to get him to stop. He said, ‘Those who are afraid, get out!’ We were hostages to the unpredictability of our chief. He drove all the way to his apartment block. We were so nervous, our shirts were soaking wet.”³

Yegor Yakovlev was hesitant about publishing the interview in contravention of the Kremlin’s gag order. He let it appear only in the German language edition of Moscow News, but it still caused a stir among the Russian intelligentsia. A month later Yeltsin gave an interview to the BBC in which he called for Ligachev to be sacked and, at last, denied that he had criticized Raisa in his “secret speech.”