Word: sverdlovsk
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After parliament abolished the Communist Party's monopoly on political power last year, radical democrats ran for and took control of city councils in the military-industrial bastions of Moscow, Leningrad and Sverdlovsk. Last September, when it looked as if Gorbachev was actually going to abandon central economic planning and accept the so-called 500-Day Plan for a market economy, the military empire struck back...
Yeltsin's rapport with audiences is as instinctive with socialites in Chicago as it is with construction workers in his native Sverdlovsk. That remarkable skill constitutes a breakthrough in an unwritten, decades-old rule of Soviet politics that inhibits leaders from relating emotionally with their audiences. If a speaker connects, after all, the implication is that the views of the audience count, that persuasion is involved, that the audience, heaven forbid, actually has something to communicate back to the stage. Yeltsin has tapped the desperate yearning of Russians to be taken seriously by their leaders, to be spoken to rather...
...privileges of the political elite. In his autobiography, Against the Grain, Yeltsin describes the opulence of the Politburo villa that he was offered (and turned down) in 1987, wickedly reminding readers along the way that the house had once been assigned to Mikhail Gorbachev. As party first secretary in Sverdlovsk during the 1970s, Yeltsin enjoyed the same perks that Gorbachev received in Stavropol province in the south. But while Gorbachev took to the privileges like an English earl to a grouse-shooting party, Yeltsin seemed to feel he had got them by sneaking over the earl's fence...
That skill undoubtedly helped him during his hardscrabble rise through Sverdlovsk's construction industry in the 1950s. His relentless drive against pilfering and wage padding angered some fellow workers but eventually attracted the attention of Communist Party recruiters. Yeltsin became an ordinary member in 1961, at the age of 30, and did not join the party hierarchy full time until seven years later...
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...