THE MOSCOW REFORM TEAM 133Kant to Marx the revolutionary.^38 He certainly had a cultural hinter-
land. Less patient than Gorbachëv, he was willing to work under his
aegis. Gorbachëv had rescued him from Canadian ‘exile’ and Yakovlev
continued to need his patronage in order to realize the changes that he
saw as being overdue. From Gorbachëv’s point of view, Yakovlev was
one of the few public radicals capable of handling a big political job.
The two of them were men with a common mission.
Yakovlev’s influence rose behind the scenes as soon as Gorbachëv
ascended to power. For a while he avoided undue confrontation with
the opponents of reform, but people who knew him attributed this
to his cunning.^39 He was an advocate of drastic reform. By April 1985,
as Gorbachëv and his entourage prepared for the month’s Central
Committee plenum, Yakovlev made a stunning proposal for the
introduction of a multiparty political system, wider scope for private
property and the loosening of controls over Eastern Europe.^40 In
December 1985, in another memo, he called for a ‘democratic society’
and a ‘market’ economy. He compared the USSR under Stalin to the
Egypt of the pharaohs.^41
Gorbachëv set about changing personnel at the top. Gromyko
stayed on in the Politburo and as President of the USSR. He might
have tried to make serious trouble; but although he still spoke about
foreign policy inside the leadership, he no longer had a trained team of
informed assistants to help him.^42 For years he had dominated the
deliberations about America in Moscow. Now he was just one con-
tributor among many. He was not the only Politburo member whom
Gorbachëv moved sideways or downwards – Grigori Romanov’s
agreement to step down from the Politburo on health grounds was
quickly secured. Even the Party Defence Department had objected to
Romanov. Obstructive and inefficient, he held up the work to such
an extent that officials complained to Gorbachëv – and Gorbachëv
anyhow wanted to eliminate a political rival.^43 He proposed that Lev
Zaikov, the Leningrad Party First Secretary, should assume responsi-
bility for the military-industrial complex. When Tikhonov queried
whether Zaikov would be able to cope with the job, Gorbachëv cut
short the discussion.^44 Tikhonov also expressed unease about the idea
of promoting Boris Yeltsin, the Sverdlovsk Party First Secretary, to
Moscow as Central Committee secretary for Construction, posing the
query: ‘And how will he perform in this new role?’ Gorbachëv again
took no notice: he had made up his mind.^45
Zaikov was a formidable party administrator. In Brezhnev’s last