Yeltsin spoils the Party - Soviet politician Boris Yeltsin; includes related article

National Review, March 19, 1990 by Eugene H. Methvin, Vladimir Shlapentokh

GORBACHEV'S SUCCESSOR?

Last month Leninism filed for Chapter 11. Gorbachev's reform Communism now looks like a halfway house. Suddenly, it's multiparty time. Could it be Yeltsin's hour?

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, who a few months ago called the notion of a multiparty system for the Soviet Union "rubbish," rattled the Central Committee meeting on February 5 by declaring himself all for it--"at a certain stage." And like good democratic centralists, all the committeemen who could be cadged into an interview by U.S. network correspondents outside the Kremlin gate agreed--some glumly, some gladly.

One who was grudging in praise for Comrade Gorbachev was Boris Yeltsin, now universally labelled a "maverick" in Western news shorthand. He was the only one of the two-hundred-plus members to vote "No" on Gorbachev's proposed new Party program renouncing the Communist monopoly on power--because the reforms didn't go far enough: "The time for half measures is over. We are sitting on top of a volcano." Asked whether he would lead a new party, Yeltsin answered he would have to wait to see what kind of new program Gorbachev and the Communist Party adopt.

But in fact Yeltsin and his followers were what the regional secretary from Kazakhstan, Svyateslav Medvedev, was talking about when he told the Washington Post's David Remnick, "Let's face it. We already have a multiparty system in effect." In effect, but not actually yet effective in the sense that people can vote the rascals out and see new faces in office after the election.

But wait. The USSR's largest republic, the Russian Republic (RSFSR), embracing 52 per cent of the nation's people, has an election March 4 for republic and local Soviets. And Boris Yeltsin is running in Sverdlovsk, where he was first Party secretary from 1976-1985. A local journalist says "there is no question whatsoever that he will win." And if nominated for chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, Yeltsin says he will "not back out of the contest."

In that post he will have a "bully pulpit." He will quickly become the second most prominent, and probably second most powerful, political figure in the country.

YELTSIN, like the USSR itself, is a man very much in evolution. Last September he had hardly landed in Manhattan before he told the press: "All my impressions of capitalism, of the United States, of Americans, that have been pounded into me over the years have changed 180 degrees in the day and a half I have been here."

Asked by Dan Rather in September to predict Gorbachev's future, Yeltsin said he has "maybe a year," and if there is no improvement in the living standard and "social justice" there will be a "revolution from below." His broad grin at the start of his comment revealed volumes about his own idea on who would be the logical leader for such a revolution, though he termed it potentially "a very dangerous thing." Dangerous indeed--and one can imagine Boris Nikolaeyevich being shot as a result of that grin.

But probably not. Gorbachev finds in Yeltsin a useful scarecrow to keep the apparatchiki moving toward perestroika. At key turns, Gorbachev has helped him, not altogether out of altruism.

For example, the Washington Post reported Yeltsin drank a quart and a half of Jack Daniels Tennessee Whisky during his night at Johns Hopkins University. An Italian reporter leaped from that to cable his paper that Yeltsin was touring America as if it were "a bar five thousand kilometers long." Pravda republished the Italian's dispatch, stirring up a storm of protest from Yeltsin admirers.

Then two revolutionary things happened. Pravda published a retraction and apology--a "grovel," some Westerners called it. This astonishing about face reportedly came at Gorbachev's personal and direct command, and in a couple of weeks Pravda's conservative editor, Viktor G. Afanasyev, was replaced by one of Gorbachev's close personal aides. Then, after Yeltsin's return, Soviet state television broadcast in the prime-time slot just before the evening news his Johns Hopkins speech and his interview in America on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. Amazed Soviet viewers saw him predict cataclysm at home and tell how he felt "twice as free" after circling the Statue of Liberty. Observed Remnick, the Post's Moscow correspondent: "The truth is, Yeltsin is a hambone . . . [who] will doubtlessly walk away from the whole affair with his popularity higher than ever."

Gorbachev had hardly been in power in the Kremlin six months when he reached way out to Sverdlovsk, in western Siberia, for Yeltsin. Gorbachev and Yegor Ligachev, second-ranking Politburo member and the man in charge of Party cadres, knew him as a capable manager and leader, and they needed such men. They put him in charge of construction, the lowest job in the Party leadership.

Gorbachev and Yeltsin are the same age, both born in early 1931. But their careers were notably different. Gorbachev was a Party activist by age 21, in 1952, when he was a student at Moscow University, and when Stalin the Terrible was still living. Yeltsin did not join the Party until a decade later. He stayed in Sverdlovsk, graduated in 1955 from the Ural Polytechnic Institute, and at thirty years old was a rising construction engineer-manager, before he took the political plunge. And that happened to be the same year Stalin's body was removed from Lenin's side in the great granite mausoleum on Red Square, when Khrushchev was in control and the "revisionists" were on the rise.