Moscow, December 25, 1991

by Conor O'Clery

Less than a year after he took office, Mikhail Gorbachev summoned Communist Party leaders from all over the Soviet Union to a great congress in the Kremlin. As Moscow city boss, Boris Yeltsin saw to it that the streets of the capital were decorated with red banners for the occasion.

  The day of the conference, February 25, 1986, was clear and bitterly cold, with the temperature hovering around zero. Inside the conference hall the new general secretary got a warm reception from the 5,000 delegates. They expected much from the dynamic new leader after the stagnation of the previous two decades.

  At this, the Twenty-seventh Party Congress, Gorbachev launched his ambitious reform program to revitalize the Soviet economy. He called it perestroika, or restructuring. Its aim was to renew Soviet-style socialism through greater freedom for initiative and to liberalize society through glasnost, or openness.

  Gorbachev had worked on his speech to the congress for several days at his holiday dacha in Pitsunda, with the help of his close collaborator, Alexander Yakovlev. A heavy-jowled, balding man in his late sixties, with large plasticrimmed glasses and his left knee stiff from a war wound, Yakovlev provided much of the intellectual drive for perestroika. Gorbachev had met him in May 1983, when he visited Canada, where Yakovlev was semi-exiled as Soviet ambassador after speaking out against Russian chauvinism.

  In fact perestroika could be traced back to a long and frank discussion Gorbachev and Yakovlev held in the backyard of a farm in Amherstburg, Ontario.[34] The ambassador told him there how the Canadian system was superior because openness and democracy acted as a check on corruption. Yakovlev so impressed Gorbachev as a liberal but loyal party theoretician that he had him brought back to Moscow and made a candidate member of the Politburo. Behind the scenes the former ambassador urged his comrade to think dangerous thoughts, like splitting the party in two, holding elections, and lifting censorship on the press.

  Raisa listened to the discussions that day in Pitsunda and participated, chiding them for ignoring the plight of women and the family in Soviet society.

  When he took the podium at the congress, Gorbachev lectured the delegates on the need to combat corruption and inertia. He promised that with perestroika, living conditions would improve and consumer goods would become more available. He spoke of “new thinking” in international relations, meaning noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs, and said that Moscow must turn away from the policy of military confrontation with the West. He made it clear that everything that was not forbidden by law was to be allowed, reversing the unwritten rule that everything not expressly allowed was prohibited.

  He also called a halt to the party habit of delivering panegyrics to the general secretary and shortly afterwards cut short lavish words of praise from Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he had appointed foreign minister, earning a round of amused applause. Party hacks nevertheless queued at the microphone to herald the new leader’s wisdom.

  When Boris Yeltsin reached the podium, everyone expected another paean of praise for perestroika. However, like the schoolboy taking on the teacher, he criticized one of the “zones beyond criticism”—the secret privileges enjoyed by party members. His few months in Moscow had made him aware of the level of public resentment over this system of lavish perks. “Let a leader go to an ordinary store and stand in line there, like everyone else,” he boomed. “Then perhaps the queues, of which everyone is sick and tired, will disappear sooner.”

  There was consternation. This was a particularly sensitive subject. Many of the delegates had secured their high positions in the party specifically to improve the quality of their lives by not having to go to ordinary stores and queue with everyone else.

  Special privileges for Communist Party members had long been a fixed part of Soviet society. The party compensated its leaders generously for their “services to the people,” according to a rigid system called the Table of Ranks that mimicked a formal list of positions and ranks in tsarist Russia.

  At the top, the members of the Politburo and the top party secretariat, some twenty-five in number, were free to use a special squadron of Ilyushin-62 long-range jetliners and Tupolev-134 twin-engine airliners to fly anywhere they wanted. Each was allocated four personal bodyguards, a large Zil limousine equipped with a radio telephone, and a state-owned country house with cooks, waitresses, and gardeners, as well as free time-shares in luxurious state holiday dachas at Black Sea resorts. Volga sedans were provided for members’ wives, with drivers on twenty-four-hour call and Kremlin number plates that made militiamen snap to attention.[35]

  Everything was paid for by the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, a 40,000-strong uniformed bodyguard for party leaders and their families, which also operated a separate government-party telephone system. A spouse could order a bodyguard to get presents, pick up a tailor for a fitting, or do the shopping. Other grades of party members received packages of choice foodstuffs delivered from “special” shops closed to outsiders. Thousands of middle- and lower-ranking apparatchiks had access to different levels of supplies from private stores and to treatment in special medical clinics.

  The system ensured loyalty. The fact that everything belonged to the state and could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice was a disincentive for a cadre to express dissent.

  Yeltsin himself gained from the fountain of party benefits. When he became a candidate member of the Politburo, he was assigned a magnificent state dacha, Moskva-reka-5, situated by the river in the village of Usovo, northwest of the capital. It had just been vacated by Gorbachev, who had moved to an even more sumptuous country mansion built to his specifications. When Yeltsin went to inspect his new home, he was met by the commander of the bodyguard, who introduced him to a bevy of cooks, maids, security guards, and gardeners. The former provincial party chief was overwhelmed by the palatial rooms with marble paneling, parquet floors, crystal lighting, an enormous glass-roofed veranda, a home cinema, a billiards room, and a “kitchen big enough to feed an army.” The commander, beaming with delight, asked Yeltsin what he thought of it. The Moscow party chief would say later that he mumbled something inarticulate, while his wife and daughters, Tanya, age twenty-five, and Yelena, age twentyeight, were too overcome and depressed to reply. “Chiefly we were shattered by the senselessness of it all.” Nevertheless, he moved in right away, even before the nails were removed from the walls where Gorbachev’s pictures had hung.

  The former Sverdlovsk boss had plunged with zeal into the role of first secretary of the Moscow Communist Party. He believed Gorbachev “knew my character and no doubt felt certain I would be able to clear away the old debris, to fight the mafia, and that I was tough enough to carry out a wholesale cleanup of the personnel.” During the first year of perestroika, he and Gorbachev spoke occasionally. They had a dedicated telephone line to each other. As one of the KGB officers assigned to guard the Moscow party chief, Alexander Korzhakov got the impression that Yeltsin “worshipped” Gorbachev, noting how he would rush to pick up the special handset when it rang.

  Yeltsin found that the task of reviving Moscow, the center of the intellectual, cultural, scientific, business, and political life of the country, was impossible under the failing command system. Moreover, he came to the conclusion that his predecessor Viktor Grishin had been an “empty bladder” who had corrupted the Moscow party organization.

  The city was in a wretched state. Everywhere there was “dirt, endless queues, overcrowded public transport,” he observed. The vegetable warehouses in particular were a scandal, full of rotting produce, rats, and cockroaches. Sorting and packing was done by resentful squads of citizens dragooned into service.

  At first Yeltsin was able to use glasnost as an instrument of reform in Moscow. He summoned a conference of 1,000 members of the Moscow party; there, with Gorbachev looking on, he berated them for being complacent and ostentatious and for exaggerating success while cooking the books. On his instructions, the proceedings were published, and caused a sensation. People queued at newspaper kiosks to read Yelt
sin’s outspoken remarks. Gorbachev himself had criticized “bribery, inertia and complete unscrupulousness in party ranks,” but Yeltsin was doing something about it. He was firing Moscow officials he found guilty of “toadyism, servility, and boot-licking.” These included one official called Promyslov, chairman of the city’s executive committee, who spent so much time on foreign junkets that a joke, which came to Yeltsin’s ears, ran that Promyslov made a short stopover in Moscow while flying from Washington to Tokyo. Yeltsin dismissed a party secretary who had the walls of his opulent home covered with animal hides, telling him, “You are only a party leader, not a prince.” He set out to “liquidate” many of the city’s redundant scientific research institutes, which had become the preserve of thousands of idle bureaucrats, something for which the faux members of the Soviet intelligentsia never forgave him. He tried to put a stop to enterprise managers exploiting workers from the countryside, who lacked Moscow residency permits, by hiring them as cheap labor.

  The burly fire-breathing Siberian also took to barging unannounced into factories, hospitals, construction sites, schools, kindergartens, restaurants, and shops, as he had done in Sverdlovsk. He confounded managers with statistics. He had a gift for memorizing numbers. After studying documents en route in the car, he would emerge and make a point of showing that he was no ignorant provincial and he knew a thing or two about their business. He took to riding in the crowded Moscow metro and on the city’s ramshackle buses, particularly at rush hours. He joined lines at food stores to see for himself how people were treated. Unrecognized once in a meat shop, he ordered a cut of veal, knowing that a supply had just been delivered. Told there was none available, he charged behind the counter and found it being passed out through a back window. He had the management dismissed.

  Yeltsin liked to reward those officials who met his high standards by giving them wrist watches. He would peel the watch from his arm for someone who pleased him, then a few minutes later produce an identical timepiece from his pocket to give to someone else. Once he made his assistant take off his precious Seiko to give to a builder. His bodyguard Korzhakov learned always to carry spare watches in his pocket.[36]

  This storming of the bureaucracy by Yeltsin at first suited Gorbachev’s purposes in getting things moving. Gorbachev told him, without smiling, that he was a “fresh strong wind” for the party. The general secretary was doing his own round of inspections and meeting the public, but in the old style, giving advance notice that he was coming. On Gorbachev’s first visit as general secretary to a Moscow hospital, the asphalt on the road outside was so fresh the steam was rising, and according to his aide, Valery Boldin, the beds in the wards to which he was directed were occupied by healthy, well-fed security officers with closely cropped hair who warmly recommended the medical staff and the food.[37]

  Politburo members, accustomed to diktat rather than dialogue, fretted about Yeltsin’s populist forays around Moscow. In mid-1986 Gorbachev personally instructed Viktor Afanasyev, the editor of the party newspaper, Pravda, to downplay coverage of the publicity-seeking Yeltsin.[38] At his urging the propaganda section of the Central Committee called in Mikhail Poltoranin, editor of the Moscow party newspaper, Moskovskaya Pravda, to dress him down for giving Yeltsin too much attention.[39] In those days the party could have editors fired. Though Gorbachev occasionally spoke up in Yeltsin’s defense, acknowledging that he was clearing the capital of “dirt and crooks,” he distanced himself from the Sverdlovsk “stormer.” So too did Yeltsin’s mentor, Yegor Ligachev, who did not like the way he was pushing party officials around. When Yeltsin shut down some special shops in Moscow, Ligachev lectured him for not making regular stores more efficient.

  Resentment of Yeltsin among his comrades erupted in a confrontation on January 19, 1987, at a regular Thursday gathering of the Politburo in the Kremlin. Gorbachev was outlining an important speech he planned to make to the Central Committee on the next stage of reform. The content had been worked out privately in advance, as was usually the case. No one was expected to open their mouth at his presentation. But Yeltsin insisted on making a bellicose critique, raising about twenty comments on the text. In particular he challenged Gorbachev’s assertion that the system was capable of renewal.

  “The guarantees enumerated, the socialist system, the Soviet people, the party, have been around for all of seventy years,” he said. “So none of them is a guarantee against a return to the past.” Yeltsin also urged Gorbachev to publicly name past Soviet leaders who were responsible for the country’s stagnation, and he demanded a limit on the general secretary’s term in office.

  He had, he would later assert, become contemptuous of Gorbachev’s “selfdelusions,” his alleged fondness for the perks of office, and his tolerance for officials continuing to live opulent lives during perestroika.

  Gorbachev was livid. His prepared critique of the shortcomings of Soviet rule was already as severe as the party members could swallow. Furious, he got up and stalked out of the room. For thirty minutes the entire Politburo sat in silence, avoiding Yeltsin’s eye.

  The general secretary of the Communist Party had worked hard to get agreement from individual Politburo members on the propositions for reform in his speech. He considered the initiatives vital to his task of turning the ship of state around slowly and carefully without running it onto the rocks. He had taken risks with hard-liners by loosening party control. He had eased the suppression of religion and set free scores of political prisoners. Just a month previously he had released the exiled Nobel Prize—winning scientist and dissident Andrey Sakharov from internal exile in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). Editors were being allowed to hint at the truth about the terrors of the Stalin period and to fill in the “blank pages” of Soviet history. He was winding down the war in Afghanistan. He was about to announce the most radical reform in seventy years of totalitarian communism, the introduction of a form of managed democracy that would enable direct elections to a Congress of People’s Deputies. He was doing this in the face of widespread resistance to perestroika by party apparatchiks who saw their sinecures threatened.

  And here was this disrespectful braggart from Sverdlovsk accusing him of maintaining the old ways.

  When he came back to the room, Gorbachev let fly at Yeltsin in a sustained harangue that lasted more than thirty minutes. Yeltsin’s reproofs were “loud and vacuous,” he cried angrily. He never did anything but offer destructive criticism, and many people in Moscow were complaining about his “rudeness, lack of objectivity, and even cruelty.” According to Yeltsin it was “a tirade that had nothing to do with the substance of my comments, but was aimed at me personally,” with the general secretary swearing at him in “almost market porter’s language.”

  The tough construction engineer and scourge of Moscow’s party hacks was crushed by Gorbachev’s furious response. When the lecture was over, Yeltsin apologized lamely, saying, “I’ve learned my lesson, and I think that it was not too soon.”

  He later reflected, “There can be no doubt that at that moment Gorbachev simply hated me.”

  Chapter 6

  DECEMBER 25: MIDMORNING

  In contrast to the Kremlin, the Russian White House is already crackling with activity on the morning of December 25, 1991. The imposing ten-year-old edifice of marble and glass, constructed in the shape of a giant submarine with a fourteen-story conning tower, is headquarters of the Russian government. The building has been a symbol of national resistance to totalitarianism since the failed August coup, when Yeltsin stood on a tank outside to defy the hard-line communists attempting to impose emergency rule and keep the Soviet Union intact. It contains the Russian Supreme Soviet, the parliament elected the previous year in the first free vote in Russia since the founding of the USSR. Before that the White House was dismissed by cynical Muscovites as a white elephant, housing a sham government and parliament, whose members were handpicked by the party and who rubber-stamped everything put in front of them. It is now home to a lively,
fractious elected assembly that only two weeks ago voted, on Yeltsin’s urging, to take Russia out of the dying Soviet Union by the end of the year.

  Visitors climbing the terraced steps are greeted by a magnificent depiction of the imperial two-headed, red-tongued eagle of tsarist Russia rather than, as before, the giant statue of Lenin standing in a recess in the hall, which is still there but which has been shrouded by curtains. In the reception rooms the large pictures of the Soviet founder that were once obligatory have been replaced with reproduction landscapes of silver birch and snow. The Russian tricolor flutters gaily from the roof, and little replica flags adorn the desks of the ministers inside. The cafeteria, so well-stocked in the days before the party system of privileges broke down, still manages to supply deputies and parliamentary staff with bread and sausage. Even in the White House, however, the shortages are evident. The ornate blue-tiled bathrooms on the fifth floor often do not have any lavatory paper; parliamentary deputies are suspected of pocketing the toilet rolls that are installed first thing in the morning and taking them home.[40]

  Boris Yeltsin enters from the basement car park and takes the private lift to his spacious office on the fifth floor. There his aide Viktor Ilyushin has laid out on his desk the December 25 editions of the Russian newspapers. A dry apparatchik in his early forties, Ilyushin has been Yeltsin’s assistant since Sverdlovsk days. Over the years he has learned to bear patiently the brunt of his boss’s sometimes petulant outbursts. He always arrives first to prepare the day’s schedule and present Yeltsin with the most important documents.

  The broadsheets devote considerable space to a series of fresh presidential decrees signed by Yeltsin the previous day, taking over departments and properties from the defunct Soviet government.

  Where the Soviet Union was established by sword and gun, it is being dismantled by decree. In the previous two months Yeltsin has been appropriating Soviet assets simply by signing one decree after another. He undermined the demoralized USSR government by first withholding Russian taxes and then taking ownership of Soviet government ministries and the currency mint. All that Mikhail Gorbachev is left with are titles, a small staff, and the nuclear suitcase.