Moscow, December 25, 1991

by Conor O'Clery

  There is applause for Yeltsin’s announcement to the Russian congress. He has many opponents in the assembly, some of them staunch communists, some vociferous critics like his own vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, who deeply regret the demise of the great superpower in which they were born, but everyone realizes that a point has been reached where practically every single republic believes it will be better off on its own.

  Vladimir Isakov from Yekaterinburg, one of the few Russian parliamentarians who openly supported the failed putsch in August, is among the small minority who voice opposition to the agreement. He rises on a point of order. He points out that when Yeltsin was elected president of Russia, he swore an oath to the constitution of the Soviet-era Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). He has now “high-handedly violated it.” Yeltsin signed the documents in Alma-Ata as the president of the Russian Federation, but it is still legally the RSFSR, he protests. Therefore the agreement is illegal.

  There is consternation. Yeltsin and his followers ceased using the Soviet title after the coup but had not got around to formally altering the name. They look completely nonplussed and a brief silence falls until the dilemma is solved by the parliament’s speaker. “Well, before the president answers the question, how about we change the name now?” suggests Ruslan Khasbulatov, an academic of Chechen descent who made his name by bravely defending the White House at Yeltsin’s side in August. “A congress will later establish whether it indeed conforms to the text of the new constitution.”

  Khasbulatov proposes a motion changing the title of the assembly to which they were elected from the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation (Russia). The measure is carried on a roll-call vote. Izvestia’s reporter Ivan Yelistratov, watching from the gallery, sees only two votes against.

  The deputies in the hall burst into applause as the Soviet republic created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 as the biggest and most powerful constituent member of the USSR, an enormous territory consisting of 6,592,800 square miles and covering more than a ninth of the earth’s land surface, ceases to exist as a legal entity. Other republics of the Soviet Union have already made similar changes in their designations, but the Russian Federation is the last to dump socialism from its official title. Shortly afterwards an excited newsreader on Radio Moscow reports that the removal of the words “Soviet” and “Socialist” reflects the official demise of the Soviet Union.

  Yeltsin has another cause for satisfaction this day. Outside the chamber several deputies rush to a conference room after hearing that a “sensational” press conference—as a reporter from Sovetskaya Rossiya describes it—is being given by an expert from a parliamentary commission investigating the August coup. The expert, Alexander Kichikhin, confirms what everyone suspected: Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the tiny Liberal Democratic Party, who often rambles round the White House corridors showering listeners with spittle during half-crazed rants about the evils of Russia’s enemies, ranging from Jews to the CIA, is a stooge of the KGB.[56] His phony party has no branches and was recruited solely to oppose Boris Yeltsin in Russia’s first ever presidential election in June. To Yeltsin’s satisfaction Zhirinovsky had got only 8 percent of the vote, despite the support of much of the official media.

  The Russian president returns to his fifth-floor cabinet and wolfs down a quick lunch. He regularly has meat pies and apples delivered from the self-service cafeteria. Out of his window he can see the wide Moscow river as it begins a loop southwest like a horseshoe, past the Kievsky Railway Station, around Luzhniki sports stadium, back northeast by Gorky Park, and around the ramparts of the Kremlin two miles distant, where Mikhail Gorbachev is also grabbing a quick lunch and fighting fatigue and the onset of influenza as he prepares for the speech that will mark his transition from presidential to civilian life.

  Yeltsin will take Gorbachev’s place there behind the Kremlin’s high, red-brick walls, completing the remarkable resurrection that began four years ago, when he was left a broken man, physically and psychologically, and demoted from Moscow party chief to the junior post of first deputy chairman of the state committee for construction.

  Chapter 9

  BACK FROM THE DEAD

  Mikhail Gorbachev’s warning to Boris Yeltsin in November 1987 that he would never let him into politics again left the former Moscow party chief with a sense of despair. He felt that “where my heart had been was a burnt-out cinder.”

  Nevertheless, Gorbachev had given him a secure job in Moscow as first deputy chairman of the state committee for construction and allowed him to remain a member of the Central Committee, when he could have banished him to the provinces and gotten rid of him once and for all.

  Yeltsin surmised sourly that if Gorbachev didn’t have a Yeltsin he would have to invent one. However much Gorbachev disliked him, Yeltsin was useful to the general secretary, who could play the role of wise, omniscient hero pitted against “Ligachev who plays the villain” on one side and, on the other, Yeltsin “the bully boy, the madcap radical.”

  Gorbachev also had to protect his own reputation as a reformer. It would not have enhanced his growing standing abroad as an enlightened progressive if he had treated his political opponent in the old way. He had to show that he could be magnanimous even to an irresponsible wrecker who he was sure could not rise above street-level politicking.

  Yeltsin spent several weeks in the hospital before being discharged. At home he endured crushing headaches and deep depression. “I felt like crawling up the wall, and could hardly restrain myself from crying out loud. It was like the tortures of hell.”[57] He couldn’t sleep and vented his feelings of rage on his family.

  He began work in the state construction ministry in Pushkin Street on January 8, 1988, a mild day with snow drifting down in large flakes, arriving in a Zil with four KGB bodyguards, as he was still a candidate member of the Politburo. He was formally relieved of this post by the Central Committee on Thursday, February 17, and that evening had to go home from work in a mid-sized Chaika, without a security escort. The demotion was automatic but left him terribly distressed. According to his assistant Lev Sukhanov, it plunged him into psychological turmoil, and the inner conflict between the two sides of his character, the party boss and the rebel, began to tear him apart.

  While Yeltsin was allowed to keep his apartment at 54 Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street, he had to move his belongings from Moskva-reka-5 dacha in Usovo to a more cramped country home. His security agents from the KGB’s Ninth Directorate were removed. One of them, Alexander Korzhakov, volunteered to stay on as a personal bodyguard and was consequently fired by the KGB. He was soon earning ten times more than he had been before. Korzhakov was taken on as a ghost employee by three sympathetic businessmen who were running cooperative enterprises that had been permitted to operate under perestroika. He did nothing except call round to each once a month to collect his “salary.” Korzhakov’s act of loyalty to Yeltsin marked the start of an intense friendship that saw the two men play tennis together and stay up drinking late at night. They became so close that they exchanged blood from their fingers, twice, to pledge eternal loyalty as “blood brothers.”

  Yeltsin used his savings to buy a sturdy Moskvich car the color of an aluminum saucepan. Korzhakov tried to teach him to drive, an experience that he claimed made his hair turn grey, especially after his chief crashed into and seriously injured a motorcyclist.[58]

  The restless Siberian had little to do in his new job and was closely monitored in case he got up to political mischief. Every morning, shifts of barely disguised KGB agents arrived to loiter in the corridor outside his office and observe who was coming in and out. His room and telephones were bugged. Lev Sukhanov called someone in Perm one day and complained about their working conditions, and a friendly KGB source told him the call to Perm had been noted and he should be careful.

  The Moscow newspapers, still
under party sway, were not permitted to publish anything positive about the former city boss. He went to Central Committee meetings, where he was ignored. In February the Paris newspaper Le Monde published Mikhail Poltoranin’s colorful account of the secret speech, including the allegation that Raisa Gorbacheva interfered with his work. Gorbachev instructed foreign ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov to tear a strip off Le Monde at a press briefing for publishing the fabrication. He was furious that Yeltsin himself did not refute the charge.

  Gradually Yeltsin’s anguish abated. He began to go for walks alone in the street. People who recognized him stopped to smile and shake his hand. Here were the first hints that the long-apathetic masses were becoming politicized and that Yeltsin had acquired a popular base outside the party structures by giving voice to people’s resentments.

  The following month it was Yegor Ligachev who overreached. When Gorbachev was on a trip abroad, the party’s number two instructed newspapers to publish a lengthy letter from a Leningrad schoolteacher, Nina Andreyevna, which defended Stalinist values and called for a halt to democratic reforms. Ligachev had sent a team to Leningrad to beef up the letter, and he pushed it as a manifesto of a new party line. No newspaper editor had the courage to refuse publication, though it was clearly a mutiny against perestroika. The country held its breath to see which way things would go.

  When Gorbachev returned to Moscow, he and Alexander Yakovlev composed a lengthy response condemning the letter as an attack on his reforms and ordered the editor of Pravda to publish it. The reform policy was seen to be on course again, and the radicals surged back out of the trenches. Gorbachev did not dump Ligachev, but the boneheaded zealot’s influence was diminished.

  In the following months newspaper editors became even more daring. Books and plays challenging communist orthodoxy began to appear. The ringing of long-silent church bells was permitted. Informal meetings at Pushkin’s statue in central Moscow were allowed so that disgruntled members of the populace could let off steam. At these ad hoc gatherings the chant of “Yeltsin! Yeltsin!” began to be heard. The former Moscow chief was becoming a lighting rod for discontent.

  In his absence, the standard of living had, if anything, deteriorated. A popular anecdote described a dog praising perestroika, saying, “My chain is a little longer, the dish is further away, but I can now bark all I want.” A well-motivated but disastrous antidrinking campaign by the Politburo resulted in an acute shortage of vodka and a collapse in government revenues. Sugar became deficit, as it was bought up to make bootleg spirits called samogon. Gorbachev had promoted the crusade, declaring that communism should not be built on vodka taxes, but Ligachev took it to the point of absurdity, at one point ordering the uprooting of hundred-year-old vines in Crimea. Another anecdote described how an American and a Russian tested the echo on a mountain top. The American shouted “bourbon” and heard the word “bourbon” echo several times. The Russian called out “vodka,” and the echo came back, “Where? Where? Where?”

  Yeltsin’s growing street profile and renewed self-confidence intrigued the media at home and abroad. In April Yegor Yakovlev, editor of Moscow News, plucked up the courage to ask Yeltsin to tell the story of how he was drugged and hauled before the Moscow party. They did the interview in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. Yakovlev suggested they take a picture of Yeltsin in his Moskvich parked outside.

  In a frolicsome mood, Yeltsin posed at the wheel of the boxy automobile with Korzhakov beside him and Sukhanov in the back, then on a whim he turned the ignition key and started steering the car towards the exit. Knowing how bad a driver he was, his passengers were terrified. “He mixed up the pedals, and it was jumping around like a kangaroo,” recalled Korzhakov. “I swear to God I never felt such fright,” said Sukhanov. “We went through Manezh Square and past the Exhibition Hall. We were trying to get him to stop. He said, ‘Those who are afraid, get out!’ We were hostages to the unpredictability of our chief. He drove all the way to his apartment block. We were so nervous, our shirts were soaking wet.”[59]

  Yegor Yakovlev was hesitant about publishing the interview in contravention of the Kremlin’s gag order. He let it appear only in the German language edition of Moscow News, but it still caused a stir among the Russian intelligentsia. A month later Yeltsin gave an interview to the BBC in which he called for Ligachev to be sacked and, at last, denied that he had criticized Raisa in his “secret speech.”

  Yeltsin’s opportunity to be heard again in Russia came at a special Communist Party conference in June 1988—the nineteenth but the first since 1941—convened by Gorbachev to push through more new reform policies. As distinct from regular party congresses, such conferences were called only rarely to resolve urgent policy matters. In the spirit of glasnost the television cameras were allowed in. Yeltsin, a semi-outcast, was not invited but was slipped a ticket as a member of the delegation from Karelia, a region on the Finnish border, where he was admired. Arriving at the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, he found himself an object of curiosity among the 5,000 delegates, making him feel like an elephant in the zoo. He sent a written request to the platform to address the conference, but he was confined to a seat at the back of the balcony, from where no one was ever called.

  On the fifth and last day, sure that he was being overlooked, Yeltsin walked down the hall staircase to the lower floor, persuaded the KGB guards to admit him, and marched to the platform holding aloft his red conference-mandate card. A delegate from Tajikistan who was speaking broke off in mid-sentence, and the hall fell silent as Yeltsin lumbered towards the rostrum, all the time staring Gorbachev in the eye. Reaching the presidium, he demanded the right to speak. Politburo members on the stage held a whispered consultation, following which Gorbachev sent Valery Boldin down to ask him quietly to go to the anteroom—he would have the floor later.

  As Yeltsin began to walk back up the isle, some sympathetic delegates and journalists whispered loudly to him not to leave the hall. Realizing he might not be readmitted, he stopped and marched back to the front row and took an empty seat there. Gorbachev had little option but to call him to the microphone.

  With delegates on the edge of their seats, Yeltsin began by asserting that he was proud of what socialism had achieved but there must be an analysis of the cause of the stagnation that still pervaded society. There should be no forbidden topics. The salaries and perks of the leadership should be made public. If there were shortages, everyone should feel them. This last remark drew a scattered round of applause; there were some in the hall who felt as he did. He concluded by asking for his political rehabilitation. This provoked boos and shouts. Gorbachev intervened. “Speak on, Boris Nikolayevich,” he said. “They want you to have your say. I think we should stop treating the Yeltsin case as secret.” Yeltsin responded that his only political mistake was to deliver his controversial speech at the wrong time, just before the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution, but that the party should tolerate opponents as Lenin did. He left the podium—to applause from some and hisses from others—and went outside, where he was surrounded by a crush of journalists and camera crews.

  In the hall some delegates rose to pillory their impulsive comrade all over again. Yegor Ligachev indignantly uttered a line that would haunt him: “Boris, you are wrong!” Within days people in Moscow were wearing lapel buttons saying, “Yegor, you are wrong!”

  As the conference was about to end, Gorbachev introduced his most farreaching domestic reform yet.[60] During his closing speech he produced a piece of paper from his pocket. On it was written a resolution to amend the constitution. This would permit the creation of a new Congress of People’s Deputies of 2,250 members, of whom two-thirds would be directly elected from all across the Soviet Union and a third chosen by party-approved public bodies. It would replace the rubber-stamp Soviet parliament, which met only eight days a year without ever hearing a dissenting voice. It was a giant leap towards democracy.

  Already looking at their watches and prepar
ing to leave for the railway stations and airports, many loyal delegates raised their cards to vote for this sensational resolution without realizing what they were doing.

  This was the high point of Gorbachev’s reforms, achieved by sleight of hand. He had got support from the ruling Communist Party for the first multiplecandidate elections in seven decades of Soviet rule. His scheme was a masterly combination of democracy and management. The party would automatically have a hundred seats. This meant that Gorbachev and his Politburo comrades could safely include themselves in the “red hundred” to avoid any risk of being rejected by the people. Gorbachev dared not seek popular support in an electoral district. Yeltsin’s celebrity was growing, and he might oppose Gorbachev and win.

  As the election laws were being drawn up, Gorbachev moved faster to push Soviet society to break with the past. Glasnost flowered as never before. The ban on the sale of foreign newspapers was lifted. Andrey Sakharov was permitted to travel abroad. Newspaper editors published scathing accounts of mismanagement and shortages. In November Gorbachev declared that “only the democratization of our entire life can guarantee to overcome stagnation.” It was springtime for glasnost. “There is no alternative to Gorbachev,” enthused Vitaly Korotich, editor of the avant-garde magazine Ogonyok (Little Flame), which had become so popular it was sold out every week within hours of going on sale. “The bureaucrats who oppose him are the usual ‘fat cats,’ people with no idealism, people who believe in nothing.”[61]