Moscow, December 25, 1991

Later, however, after Yeltsin returned to Moscow, Soviet television obtained footage of him slurring his words at the Baltimore event. Under orders from Gorbachev’s aides, the progressive head of state television, Mikhail Nenashev, was forced to broadcast it nationwide at prime time, though he was against putting it on air at all and took care to include shots of Yeltsin arriving home with a gift of 100,000 disposable syringes for hospitals.⁴ Yeltsin claimed the tape was deliberately slowed down by the KGB to make him look intoxicated, though even his supporters inside Soviet television doubted that this was true. Nevertheless, the episode deepened Yeltsin’s hatred for Gorbachev and Gorbachev’s contempt for his adversary.

A week after the Pravda story appeared, Yeltsin found himself at the center of another embarrassing controversy.⁵ Sometime after ten o’clock on the exceptionally cold, dry evening of September 28, he appeared soaking wet at the guard post of the Uspenskoye government dacha compound. He told the militiamen there that he had dismissed his driver and was walking the last three hundred meters to visit an old friend, carrying a bunch of flowers, when unidentified men threw him off a bridge into the Moscow River. Alerted by one of the militiamen, his daughter Tanya telephoned Alexander Korzhakov, who grabbed some warm clothes, a bottle of spirits, and some apples and drove to the militia post in his Niva. Yeltsin’s security chief found his boss lying motionless by an electric heater. He was blue with cold, “as if ink was poured over him,” and wearing only wet briefs. His suit was hanging on a nail with blood and grass stains.

Yeltsin told him that after his official car was driven off, four big men shoved him into the back of a red Zhiguli and dropped him from the bridge with a sack tied over his head. He would have drowned if he had not managed to free himself.

The guards made a report, and Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin took note of Yeltsin’s statement. Two weeks later Bakatin recounted the story to the Supreme Soviet, with Gorbachev in the chair. There was a flurry of press interest, with speculation ranging from the possibility that Yeltsin was visiting his mistress—a a cook in a dacha whose occupant was away—and that she had doused him with a bucket of water (the cook denied an affair), or that there was a KGB plot to kill or embarrass him, or even that he had showed up uninvited at a birthday party in Nikolay Ryzhkov’s nearby dacha, which Gorbachev was attending, and KGB guards had been told to teach him a lesson. Looking back years later, Korzhakov was still at a loss about what happened. The river was only a meter deep, he recalled. “It was a joke to think he would have drowned, and Yeltsin was telling me the water was over his head.”⁶

Gorbachev taunted Yeltsin about the incident in a televised exchange at the Supreme Soviet. But most people in Moscow preferred again to give Yeltsin the benefit of the doubt. He was a flesh-and-blood Russian, one of them, who drank hard, fell into rivers, spoke out, and took the consequences. The more he was attacked by the organs of communism, the more were ordinary Muscovites convinced that he was their man.

On the evening of December 14, 1989, Andrey Sakharov, the intellectual force for change in Russia who complemented Yeltsin’s crude political force, died from a heart attack. The former dissident was eulogized by a guilty nation that realized it had lost its moral compass. His body was laid out in the Academy of Sciences building, and tens of thousands of mourners queued in heavy snow to file past the bier.⁷ Gorbachev and other Politburo members came and stood briefly to pay their respects to the honest scientist whom they had kept in internal exile as a dissident. Boris Yeltsin stood motionless for several minutes by his body, as if absorbing Sakharov’s spirit and acknowledging his own new role as undisputed leader of the opposition in a fast-changing Russia. Yeltsin was now the most prominent member of a loose collection of elected radicals known as the Interregional Group of Deputies, which had held some chaotic, freewheeling sessions since it was formed in a Moscow hotel lobby during the summer to press for speedier reform.

Before Sakharov was interred in the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery, over 100,000 people attended a funeral rally in a slushy car park at which calls for the end of the Communist Party’s monopoly predominated. Commuters in a passing train opened windows to shout and wave encouragement. The public mood was becoming more defiant of authority. Such displays boded ill for a party that relied on control of an apathetic people to remain in power.