Word: gorbachev
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Once in, Yeltsin rose rapidly. A vigorous, workaholic leader, he spared neither himself nor his subordinates. In 1976 Leonid Brezhnev unexpectedly promoted him over the heads of more senior officials to the post of Sverdlovsk provincial first secretary. He soon met and became friends with Gorbachev, by now his opposite number in Stavropol. "When I entered Gorbachev's office," Yeltsin wrote in his autobiography, "we would embrace warmly. The relationship was a good...
...remained so for a while after Gorbachev became the party's General Secretary in March 1985. Yeltsin soon arrived in Moscow as Central Committee Secretary for Construction, and Gorbachev later selected him for the tough task of cleaning up the corrupt Moscow party apparatus. With that job came candidate membership in the Politburo and such perquisites as a marble-lined dacha, a small army of servants and access to special Kremlin consumer stores. Far from being seduced by such luxury, Yeltsin was repelled, and that led to his wildly popular denunciations of high living by Soviet leaders...
...Yeltsin's hard-charging approach also displeased Gorbachev, who disliked confrontation. Not until Yeltsin began to criticize Gorbachev in 1987, however, did the two former friends find themselves seriously at odds. "There can be no doubt," Yeltsin wrote, "that at that moment, Gorbachev simply hated...
...officials today say Yeltsin has matured, though they wonder whether he has a serious strategy for building a political opposition to Gorbachev. His ability to muster popular outrage against the privileged center is unrivaled: the masses are drawn to him as the personification of anti-incumbent sentiment...
...needs to show how he would translate that public support into a concrete way of putting reforms into action, or even unseating Gorbachev. As the economy worsens, says Dimitri Simes, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Yeltsin must do more than agitate to throw the bums out. "While people still like him, will still vote for him," says Simes, "they're losing confidence that he can make a difference." But Michael Mandelbaum, a Soviet expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, maintains that though Yeltsin's reform ideas may not be detailed...