The collapse of Gorbachev's efforts to steer a middle course toward a mixed system at home and abroad was in large measure a product of the social forces his policies had unleashed in the USSR and Eastern Europe. But if there was one individual who acted as an independent causal force in the unfolding of this process, it was Boris Yeltsin. Initially, during 1986–1988, Yeltsin merely complicated Gorbachev's authority-building efforts. During 1989–1991, however, he effectively scuttled Gorbachev's attempts to recoup lost credibility. When Gorbachev first tapped Yeltsin for a leadership position in Moscow in 1985, raising him from the ranks of first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Party organization, he had little idea of the trouble he was buying. Gorbachev's authority-building strategy at that point was still fairly conservative, and in 1986–1987 it would come to combine radicalization with a controlled and evolutionary pace of change. It sought to expand the arenas of politics and transform the language of politics, but at a pace to be dictated by the general secretary. Yeltsin, it turned out, found the pace in each realm to be intolerably slow.

YELTSIN, GORBACHEV, AND THE STAGE OF POLITICAL SUCCESSION, 1985–1986

The Politburo brought Yeltsin to Moscow in April 1985, appointing him first as head of the Central Committee construction department and then as Central Committee secretary for construction. By his own admission, he hated the experience, for the central Party apparatus left him much less leeway to run things as he saw fit.