Against the Grain: an Autobiography. - book reviews

National Review, May 28, 1990 by Eugene H. Methvin

SHORTLY AFTER Leonid Brezhnev's 1981 autobiography" was published, a Moscow dance company converted it into a ballet. One astounded Soviet emigre commentator demanded, And who gets to dance the part of Brezhnev? They will all probably have to take turns for the honor!"

Rest assured Boris Yeltsin's autobiography, Against the Grain, will provoke no ballets in Moscow-and no applause in the Kremlin either. But in Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin's hometown, and in other precincts, people will applaud, and raise again his campaign cry, "Skazhee'm, Yeltsin!" (Tell 'em!")

Yeltsin portrays himself as an uncomplicated construction engineer and manager, proud, not especially introspective, not philosophical, and not particularly ambitious. He is certainly no apparatchik, and comes across as a basically decent man whose sensibilities were offended and often outraged by the hypocrisy, greed, and disloyalty he witnessed as he ascended the Communist Party apparat into the upper reaches of Soviet politics.

The author acknowledges the considerable help of a talented young journalist, Valentin Yumashev, who no doubt improved his prose, organization, and audience appeal. Yet the suspicion arises that a long-hidden group of fanatical anti-communist gnomes has produced this book in some basement workshop at CIA headquarters in Langley, and is palming it off on Western publishers as the autobiography of a recent Politburo member. After all, a few years back we had the "discovery" of Hitler's 'secret diary."

But Yeltsin is alive, and he has not disavowed this book. In fact, he has been out promoting it.

It is difficult to imagine what calculus of self-advancement could he behind this book. Can Yeltsin's motivation be simply an extravagant determination to say what he thinks and let the chips fall where they may.? Nothing is so surprising as an honest man. That is the pose Yeltsin strikes, and in the end, he is fairly convincing. There is a human naturalness in his reactions and in his depiction of himself that would be refreshing in any politician-anytime, anywhere.

Yeltsin pays a sincere and moving tribute to the early Gorbachev for opening up Soviet politics-and then proceeds to scald him with bitter criticism and devastating specifics. He describes the palatial dacha Gorbachev vacated for a new one; Yeltsin and his family inherited the old one as a hand-me-down, and were "shattered by the senselessness" of its opulence. %Wy was it thought necessary to give expression to such an absurd degree to the fantasies of property, pleasure, and megalomania harbored by the Party elite? No one, not even the most outstanding public figures of the contemporary world, could possibly find a use for so many rooms, lavatories, and television sets all at the same time."

Yeltsin never satisfactorily answers his own question: How did the system ever belch up a Boris Yeltsin?-the only such blunder in seventy years, as he himself notes. His basic competence and innate flair for leadership, evident in some bizarre boyish escapades, got him to the top of the construction bureaucracy in Sverdlovsk province in 1969 after 14 years, at age 38. In 1976 Brezhnev named him provincial Party boss. That meant he was virtually the dictator of a city of 1.2 million inhabitants, plus 45 towns in the region, and 63 smaller townships, a total population of five million in the province, whose industrial production is the nation's third largest. In 1985 Gorbachev called Yeltsin to Moscow and quickly made him Party boss of Moscow with a clear mandate to clean house. He automatically became a non-voting member of the Politburo. His description of that body's regular Thursday brain-deadening meetings of self-congratulation, delusion, and fawning unanimity explains his growing disillusionment with the system.

My wife says, "Just listening to you read that book, I'd say Boris Yeltsin is first of all a humorist. But then knowing your weird sense of humor, I'm not sure." I suppose it is weird to break out cackling when one reads a Soviet politician thus describe Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov: When this classic old-style Russian general contemplates the country's civilian population, he is obviously longing, in his heart of hearts, to conscript every single adult for permanent military service ... Personally I prefer the American system, under which the Secretary of Defense must be a civilian."

Glasnost indeed! Gorbachev deserves the first Nobel Prize for Hilarity for letting Yeltsin loose in the Soviet holy of holies. The sight of this bull goring sacred cows left and right confirms Mencken's dictum that democracy is the most entertaining form of government ever devised.

Although he never shakes free of his Party and Leninist upbringing, the man begins to sound like a convinced democrat when he pens such lines as this: "Dissidents should be paid 13 months' salary for a year, otherwise our mindless unanimity will bring us to an even more hopeless state of stagnation."

And though Yeltsin professes neutrality on religion, he welcomes the regeneration of the church in the USSR: "I am convinced that the moment is coming when, with its message of eternal, universal values, it will come to the aid of our society. For in these words: Thou shalt not kill; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,' lie those very moral principles that will enable us to survive even the most critical situations."