On Nov. 9, 1987, a month after he was humiliated before the party and attacked by people he thought were his friends, two days after he stood on Lenin`s tomb to watch the big Revolution Day parade, Boris Yeltsin suffered a breakdown.
His world had fallen apart.
For attacking President Mikhail Gorbachev for slowing the pace of reform, he drew a withering response from every direction. Communism had been his religion, his mentor, his persona since he was a young man, and now it was gone.
In his autobiography, Yeltsin describes his symptoms as a severe headache that would not go away and sharp chest pains. He said he was pumped full of tranquilizers and ordered to stay in bed. Two days after his admission to the hospital, he got a phone call from Gorbachev.
”You must come and see me for a short while, Boris Nikolayevich,” said a cheery Gorbachev, according to Yeltsin. ”After that, perhaps we will go and attend the plenum of the Moscow City Committee together.”
Yeltsin protested that his doctors had told him to stay in bed. But Gorbachev countered, ”Don`t worry, the doctors will help you get up.”
And so he went.
His account describes what followed as being ”murdered by words.” Men he had worked with, people he had trusted, marched forward to condemn him before the Moscow committee.
”And so I was dismissed, ostensibly at my own request, but it was done with such a ranting, roaring and screaming that it has left a rotten taste in my mouth to this day,” Yeltsin wrote.
Reflecting on the incidents, Yeltsin believed he was playing a role important to Gorbachev, cast as ”the bully boy, the madcap radical,” so Gorbachev could play the ”wise omniscient hero.” That is what Yeltsin meant in saying that if he didn`t exist, Gorbachev would have to create him.
He paid a high price.
”I now had to lift myself out of the personal crisis I was in. I looked inside and there was no one there. A kind of void, a vacuum, had been created, a human vacuum. Life is strange. . . . I had always been drawn to people. . . . When they betray you, one after another, then by the dozens . . . you begin to feel a strange sense of doom,” Yeltsin wrote.
After Yeltsin was crushed so badly it seemed there was nothing left but regrets and ashes. Gorbachev called and offered him a job in a junior ministerial post. He took it.
Anyone reviewing this history without knowing what was to follow would assume Yeltsin, a broken man in an unimportant job, would be pensioned off to play the role of a modern-era Nikita Khrushchev-in-exile.
He would putter in the garden, perhaps develop elaborate construction plans reflecting the happier times in his life, sit with his grandchildren on his knee and occasionally pop up in an interview in any one of the many obscure journals published by various interests within the Soviet Union.
No one would place him next to the gun turret on an armored personnel carrier, the embattled, beloved leader urging his Russian people to reject an attempted coup against democracy.
But Boris Yeltsin made a tremendous comeback.
To overcome the sense of betrayal, he said, he turned to the memories of friendships from earlier in his life. His old school buddies were important. They had been holding regular reunions for years. And there were the people of Moscow who had warmed to him. He had what an American politician would call
”a base.” And with Russia heading toward democracy, he knew how to build on it.
It took about a year and a half.
Then he went off like one of the big mortars they use to launch huge fireworks displays along the Moscow River:
– March 1989. Yeltsin is elected by an overwhelming margin by the people of Moscow to the new Congress of People`s Deputies.
– July 1989. He is a founder of the Inter-Regional Group, the first parliamentary opposition faction to the Gorbachev government.
– March 1990. He is elected to the Congress of People`s Deputies of the Russian Federation.
– May 1990. He is elected president of Russia by the parliament.
– July 1990, proclaiming himself independent, he quits the Communist Party.
– June 1991. Yeltsin is elected by the voters of the Russian federation to the post of president, making him the first democratically elected chief executive in Russian history.
There were some big fizzles along this pyrotechnical course.
For example, he was portrayed in a 90-minute report by an Italian film crew as being drunk much of the time during a visit to the U.S. as a member of the deputies group. Not surprisingly, this film made its way back to Soviet television.
No, Yeltsin argued, he wasn`t drunk. He was just woozy from a sleeping pill he had to take. He also charged the videotape as broadcast on Soviet TV had been altered to slur his speech.
Then there was the strange story of an attempt on his life.
At Uspenskoye in the countryside outside Moscow, he was walking toward the dacha of an old friend, he said, when a car appeared behind him and the next thing he knew, he was splashing around in the Volga River.
He said he swam to shore, rested, then went to the police.
Then he made a mistake. He asked the police to tell no one what had happened, definitely not a glasnost-like move, fearing that enemies would use the incident anyway they could.
And of course, his enemies did.
One report said he was on the way to see a girlfriend at her dacha and she tossed a bucket of cold water on him. In another, an Interior Ministry official said there had been no attempt on his life.
In Yeltsin`s own words, ”I reacted calmly to what sociologists would call a drop in my ratings.”
He survived.
He thrived.
After the election victories, he proved he could outrun any reformer in the Soviet Union. The Russian Republic is in the vanguard of economic and social reform in the Soviet Union today.
He has been most astute, gathering Gorbachev`s rejected liberal advisers, embracing the 500-day economic plan Gorbachev rejected, urging faster and deeper reforms. He also reached a rapproachment of sorts with Gorbachev in August 1990.
As Gorbachev`s own personal popularity has collapsed, Yeltsin`s has climbed.
But everyone knows that by now.
What everyone does not know is that the world was witnessing what Yeltsin has called the third of his three lives. The second was his climb to power and his failure. And a look at the first, his formative years, reveals a great deal about his character.
If it is impossible to check out every assertion made in a Russian politician`s biography, it`s not impossible to play pop-psychologist based on the incidents he chose to reveal.
Yeltsin paints the picture of a childhood in the impoverished countryside of the Soviet Union of the 1930s, where famine and poverty were routine, and where Stalinist purges gave a bloody definition to the region`s history.
He was born in Butko, a village in the Sverdlovsk region, on Feb. 1, 1931. It was not an auspicious beginning.
His mother told him that on the day he was baptized, the priest was so drunk that he dropped the blessed little package into the baptismal waters and just left him down there, gurgling from the depths.
When his mother realized what was happening, she ran to the water, snatched her son from the bottom of the pool and shook the water from him. The priest, seeking to snatch some respectability from the jaws of disaster, said this little man surely was strong, so he was going to name him Boris.
By Yeltsin`s own account, he saw hard times:
”My father was rough and quick-tempered, just like my grandfather. No doubt they passed these characteristics on to me. My parents constantly argued about me. My father`s chief instrument for teaching good behavior was the strap.
”My mother would weep and beg him not to touch me. But he would firmly shut the door and tell me to lie down. I would pull up my shirt and lower my trousers. He would lay into me with a great thoroughness.”
He would clench his teeth and not scream, which only angered his father more, Yeltsin recalled. His mother would burst in, snatch the strap from his father and stand between the angry man and his son.
”She always defended me,” he wrote.
Despite the poverty-he lived with his family and many others for years in a wood shed-Yeltsin says he was a spirited child and had many adventures, some of which may explain his determination.
During World War II, for example, he and some friends raided an ammo depot and took some hand grenades, apparently to see how they worked. Being children, of course, they decided to take them apart. And being stupid, of course, they tried to do it with a hammer. The fuse in a grenade exploded, mangling two fingers on Yeltsin`s left hand. Gangrene developed and surgeons cut off the fingers.
He was such a behavior problem at grammar school that he was expelled at his graduation. He was the master of many great pranks. In one, he urged an entire room filled with children to jump from the windows of a classroom, leaving a returning teacher baffled as to their whereabouts.
He was a great rover and loved rambles in the woods.
One summer, he and his friends set off to find the source of a river. They hiked deep into the woods, finding their goal. But they got lost on the way out. They all became ill from drinking swamp water. Yeltsin recalls fighting fever to bring his friends back to civilization.
”Typhoid fever kept us in the hospital for nearly three months,” he wrote.
Despite his handicap, he became a great volleyball player and was part of a team that represented Sverdlovsk in contests all over the Soviet Union. Volleyball became an obsession, along with succeeding at school. He wasn`t only a strong player, but a good coach, too, guiding the men`s and women`s second teams at Urals Polytechnic Institute.
In another adventure, he hopped freight trains to various parts of the country and once ended up traveling with a group of convicts.
In a poker game, they won every bit of money, a watch and all his clothes, leaving him naked, but wiser. He won his clothing back but never learned whether that was just because the convicts liked him, or because the nakedness inspired a great blush of poker wisdom.
At school in the Urals, he opted for construction engineering and apparently did well in his courses. In his autobiography, he seems a man torn between two loves, success and volleyball. When he graduated, he was offered a job as a foreman; instead, he decided to take a regular worker`s job-one of 12 trades he would hold in a year.
If he seems impulsive today, he wasn`t impulsive at all about love. Yeltsin and his wife spent a full year apart, he recalled, he pursuing the glories of volleyball, she going to school, under an agreement that would test whether they were truly suited to one another. They were married in the late 1950s.
”Our lives have proved that we were brought together by fate,” Yeltsin wrote. ”Naya took me and loved me as I am-obstinate and prickly-and I confess she has not had an easy time with me. As for myself, I need hardly say that I have always loved her and will love her all my life.”
As a coda to the story of his life, Yeltsin reflects on the momentous events in Eastern Europe in 1989. He watched as the former Soviet satellites shed the burdensome mantle of communism and, flaws and all, blossomed into new societies. He seemed to long to join them.
But reform is tough. In his autobiography, he offers information so chilling and predictive it rivets a readers eyes to the page:
”The latest news: Rumors are going around Moscow that a coup is being planned for the next plenum of the Central Committee, with the aim of dismissing Gorbachev from his post of general secretary. . . . I don`t believe these rumors, but even if they come true, I shall fight for Gorbachev . . . . Yes, I shall fight for him, my perpetual opponent, the lover of half- measures. . . . Our huge country is balanced on a razor`s edge, and nobody knows what will happen to it tomorrow.”
When that awful tomorrow came, Boris Yeltsin was there on the tank, the man of the moment. A man transformed by his experience transformed his nation in return.
