Moscow, December 25, 1991

by Conor O'Clery

  Gorbachev’s stock rose internationally. In February 1989 the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan. U.S.-Soviet talks on nuclear disarmament gathered pace. He created the conditions for the freedom of East European countries that had been in thrall to Moscow since World War II. He made it clear that the doctrinaire communist regimes there could no longer count on Soviet tanks to prop them up. At a Foreign Ministry briefing Gerasimov called this the Frank Sinatra doctrine—they could do it their way. It led to a series of counterrevolutions throughout 1989, in which one communist regime after another in Eastern Europe was ousted. They began in Poland and spread to Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The Berlin Wall fell in November, leading to German reunification a year later.

  Aware that if Yeltsin won a contested seat in the new Congress of People’s Deputies, he would have a popular mandate, the Soviet leader set a trap for his most strident critic. He fixed the rules so that government ministers could only stand for election if they resigned their posts. If his tormentor did run, and if he were defeated, he would be out of a job.

  Yeltsin did decide to run when the election was called for March 26, 1989. He put his name forward as a candidate in Moscow’s District Number 1, a constituency encompassing the whole city. The Politburo agreed to the novel proposal of holding a “selection meeting” at which 1,000 party members would choose two out of three prospective candidates to represent the capital. Of the party members given permission to take part, 800 were, by Yeltsin’s reckoning, carefully chosen as obedient, brainwashed card-carriers, who had been instructed to favor Yury Brakov, general manager of the Zil plant. After a meeting that went on until 3 a.m., Yeltsin was nominated with more than 50 percent support, and Brakov came second. The card carriers were not so obedient after all.

  His vigor restored, Yeltsin raced around Moscow to crowded election rallies, capitalizing on his underdog status to whip up support. He advocated ending party privileges and allowing people to decide issues by referendum. The party inadvertently added to his mystique by instructing editors to ignore his campaign. A more effective telegraph agency was at work on his behalf: the rumor circuit, which for decades had been the conduit for hard news in the Soviet capital. When a worried Gorbachev approved a Politburo commission to censure Yeltsin for antiparty activities, tens of thousands of outraged voters poured into the streets for the biggest unsanctioned public gathering in Moscow since the Revolution, and the idea was quickly dropped.

  Having set democracy and glasnost in motion, Gorbachev had to agree to allow a debate on state television between Yeltsin and Brakov, representing the progressive and conservative wings of the Communist Party respectively. The evening it was shown, millions tuned in to watch. But not everything was above board. The “ordinary citizens” who allegedly telephoned the studio and whose questions were passed on to the candidates were set up. The man who supposedly posed the most hostile question to Yeltsin told reporters next day that he was unaware his name had been used. “Tell Yeltsin not to worry,” he said. “I’m going to vote for him anyway.”[62]

  On election day, Candidate Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, riding a wave of popular affection, got six million votes, almost nine out of every ten votes cast. Of the newly elected deputies to the Congress, 85 percent were members of the party, but it was not much of a party victory. A sizeable minority were disillusioned party radicals like Yeltsin who could not be relied on to vote in divisions according to the instructions of the Central Committee as in the past. Gorbachev acknowledged that “the election has shown for whom the bell tolls.”[63] But ungraciously, he did not congratulate Yeltsin for three days, and his rival’s triumph was barely mentioned in Pravda.

  Yeltsin had to admit that he had Gorbachev to thank for his political resurrection. Stalin shot awkward comrades; Khrushchev pensioned them off; Brezhnev sent them as ambassadors to distant countries. “Gorbachev’s perestroika set a new precedent,” he conceded later. “A dismissed politician was given the chance to return to political life. New times were on the way, unpredictable and unfamiliar, in which I had to find a place for myself.”[64]

  In four years Gorbachev had presided over an extraordinary liberalization of Soviet society. People could march, demonstrate, vote in elections, criticize the party, and enjoy a much freer press. By doing so he had, however, unleashed forces that threatened to destroy the party he led. Elected deputies would inevitably respond to the people who voted for them rather than members of an increasingly unpopular Communist Party apparatus. The conservatives trying to hold him back had no alternative policy, other than a return to the old ways, which meant repression and stagnation.

  The People’s Congress opened on May 25, 1989, in the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin. The ten days of debates were televised live on Gorbachev’s orders. He was stunned by the anger and vitriol that poured forth. On the first day viewers heard attacks on the KGB, criticism of Raisa, and calls for the removal of Lenin’s body from the Red Square Mausoleum. Siberian writer Valentin Rasputin electrified everyone by suggesting that Russia should one day leave the Union.

  Deprived for so long of the right to even listen to such criticisms without risking arrest, people across the eleven time zones of the Soviet Union could not tear themselves away from their radios and televisions. Three years after emerging from exile as a dissident, Andrey Sakharov, selected as a deputy for the Academy of Sciences, was able to broadcast to the nation his call for a federal structure to replace the Soviet Union, in order to end the oppression suffered under the Stalinist model. There was outrage across the country when Gorbachev cut off the microphone as Sakharov was calling for a repeal of Article 6 of the Soviet constitution, which guaranteed the leading role of the Communist Party. Though Sakharov had run well over his time, many never forgave Gorbachev this one act of censorship, stilling the voice of conscience that had been silenced for years.

  Gorbachev had nevertheless achieved a truly amazing feat in liberalizing debate about the future in a country where people had been gagged for most of the century. For the first time all the opposing and disparate elements of Soviet political life gathered in one place, free to say what they liked: hard-line communists, former dissidents, military officers, workers, scientists, academics, and intellectuals, not to mention a few Orthodox bishops and Muslim muftis.

  Deputies and journalists mixed freely in the huge airy foyer draped with hanging ferns and at a gigantic buffet with one hundred and forty tables laden with savories and attended by two hundred and eighty waiters in identical white suits and bow ties. Dazed Politburo members found themselves besieged when they appeared among the crowd. The secretive Soviet leadership was suddenly accessible and diminished by being seen in the flesh.

  The Congress was still subservient to the party and its leader, however. Hundreds of old-style communists had got themselves elected by posing as democrats. Historian Yury Afanasyev termed the body “Stalinist-Brezhnevite” in its overall makeup. Yeltsin preferred to term it “Gorbachevian, faithfully reflecting our chairman’s inconsistency, timidity, love of half measures and semi-decisions.”[65]

  When it came to the election by the Congress members of a supreme soviet, a smaller body that would meet regularly to consider legislation, Yeltsin was consequently overlooked. Crowds came out on the streets of Moscow in a spontaneous protest. A deputy from Siberia, Alexey Kazannik, offered to give up his Supreme Soviet place to make way for Yeltsin. In the end, Gorbachev realized that denying the politician with the biggest single electoral mandate would make the Congress look ridiculous and ultimately bent the rules to allow what Yeltsin called a “castling” measure to take his seat in the upper body.

  Nothing was the same for Soviet citizens after the sturm und drang of the Kremlin sessions. “On the day the Congress opened they were one sort of people,” observed Yeltsin. “On the day it closed, they were a different people. However negatively we assess the final result… the most important thing was achieved. Almost the entire populati
on was awakened from its lethargy.”[66]

  Yeltsin himself became a different person through his exposure to the radical reformers who gathered around him in the Kremlin foyer. Andrey Sakharov especially made a strong impression. Sakharov did not like Yeltsin, but he saw in him a leader for the emerging democrats, one who had a level of support among the proletariat to which members of the intelligentsia could not aspire. The Congress marked the real start of Yeltsin’s political evolution from communist “stormer” to anticommunist democrat.

  Gorbachev noted how unhappy his Politburo comrades were about the whole exercise. “How could it be otherwise, when it was already clear to everybody that the days of party dictatorship were over!”[67]

  From his exile in Vermont, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the chronicler of the gulag, saw a flicker of hope for his native land. “Russia lies utterly ravaged and poisoned; its people are in a state of unprecedented humiliation, and are on the brink of perishing physically, perhaps even biologically,” he noted. Now, however, “having lived through these seventy lethal years inside communism’s iron shell, we are crawling out, though barely alive.”[68]

  When he went for his summer vacation at Foros on the Black Sea, Mikhail Gorbachev mused aloud to Raisa about his future, wondering whether he should step aside. Now that people had got such a great measure of freedom, let others show that they know how to use it, he suggested. He was not serious, but Raisa was, perhaps sensing what lay ahead. “It’s time, Mikhail Sergeyevich,” she said, “to devote yourself to private life, to retire and write your memoirs. You’ve done your job.”[69]

  Chapter 10

  DECEMBER 25: MIDDAY

  In the Kremlin, after his lunch of small open-faced salami sandwiches and cottage cheese with sour cream, Mikhail Gorbachev is overwhelmed with tiredness and the enormity of what he has to do in a few hours.[70] At the back of his office, behind the work table, is a door leading to a small resting room. Inside are a bed and washing facilities. Gorbachev goes in, shuts the door, and lies down to rest.

  Anatoly Chernyaev and Andrey Grachev find the president’s office empty when they enter shortly afterwards with a sheaf of farewell letters for him to sign. They have been dictated by Gorbachev and are addressed to foreign presidents, prime ministers, and royalty. The recipients comprise an A list of current and former world leaders whom he has met and befriended during his years in office: George H. W. Bush, Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand, John Major, Giulio Andreotti, Bria n Mulroney, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the heads of the governments of Korea, Finland, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Iran, and Norway. Gorbachev has worked hard to get the tone and content of the letters right. The warm relationship with his counterparts abroad is most important to the Soviet president. It is a measure of his international standing, a recognition of what he has achieved in reforming the Soviet Union, and an assurance of global approval for lessening world tensions, reversing the nuclear arms race, allowing the Berlin Wall to fall, and letting Eastern European countries have their freedom.

  Chernyaev knocks on the door of the resting room. It takes Gorbachev five minutes to compose himself and come out. He looks fresh and fit, but his eyes are teary. Grachev notes a slight redness, caused either by lack of sleep or perhaps the shedding of a few tears provoked by the tension of the final days. The president settles into his high-backed leather chair and carefully reads the letters one by one before signing each with a felt pen. Chernyaev leaves to have them dispatched.

  Grachev takes the opportunity to show Gorbachev the front page of Moskovsky Komsomolets. It has a headline from an 1836 verse by the poet Alexander Pushkin, “Exegi Monumentum”: “I shall not wholly die.” Gorbachev’s eyes light up. He finishes the quotation triumphantly: “In my sacred lyre, my soul shall outlive my dust and escape corruption.”[71] In common with most Russians, Gorbachev can recite Pushkin and other national poets at length. A few days ago he had recalled for some American visitors a narrative by the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in which one of his characters didn’t like the United States and wanted to close it down. Gorbachev was making the point that the Soviet republics had no right to say the USSR was dead.[72] When he is in a mellow mood after a good dinner, he is known to entertain guests by declaiming the lines of Mayakovsky in a quiet voice—though it is some time since he quoted the famous phrase “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, and Lenin will live” from the poet’s elegy “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.”

  Like many world leaders, Gorbachev has gotten out of the habit of reading the newspapers himself, preferring that his subordinates provide him with what he needs to know, thus protecting him from negative coverage. Under glasnost, censorship was relaxed, and newspapers became more daring. Now they provide freewheeling news and commentary, and much of it is insulting to the outgoing president.

  Gorbachev has not yet been shown that day’s editions, and Chernyaev decides not to upset him by disclosing that they reveal in humiliating detail several aspects of his personal affairs. A report in Rossiyskaya Gazeta discloses that at Alma-Ata four days ago Yeltsin and the presidents of the other republics discussed Gorbachev’s material and financial benefits after he steps down as Soviet president.

  “Regarding Gorbachev’s conditions of retirement,” the writer states, “Yeltsin announced the following: He will be given a pension equivalent to today’s salary, indexed for inflation; he will be given a state dacha but not the one he is in; he will have two state cars and a twenty-strong staff, including security, drivers, and service. After a vacation he will start his activities in the Gorbachev fund.”

  A commentary in the newspaper rubs it in: “Gorbachev induced chaos, which destroyed the doomed empire… and has to pay for it by being withdrawn from the post without pity or sorrow from his fellow politicians and the Soviet people.”

  Chernyaev is furious that Yeltsin has leaked—and distorted—the details of his private dealings with Gorbachev. The Russian president had blabbed to editors to let the world know how generous and considerate his behavior is towards his defeated adversary and how “civilized” his last meeting with Gorbachev had been—a nine-hour session on Monday at which they hammered out the terms of Gorbachev’s departure from political life. The reports say that Gorbachev was too demanding and Yeltsin had to reduce “by ten times,” from two hundred to twenty, the number of staff he wanted to retain. The claim “is a lie because Gorbachev didn’t ask for two hundred people,” Chernyaev writes in his diary. There are other things “in the same nasty style.”[73] It adds insult to injury, he feels, that the amount of Gorbachev’s pension has been bandied about, apparently with unconcealed relish, among the leaders of the republics, former allies who used to show Gorbachev deference but who now regard him with contempt. Some wanted to give him nothing.

  He is also privately dumbfounded by the way Gorbachev, too, is portraying his last conversation with Yeltsin on Monday as civilized. It is an illusion, Chernyaev believes, to talk about that meeting, as Gorbachev does, as if it had been conducted in a normal fashion, as if between comrades, and “as if nothing happened ,” when it was in fact an exercise in condescension and triumphalism on Yeltsin’s part. Chernyaev admires “the unrivaled courage and self-control that Gorbachev has demonstrated in situations of premeditated humiliation and disrespect towards his achievements and his name, all under an avalanche of disgusting mendacity and mockery.” At the same time he is somewhat resentful of the president’s obsession with his own fate. He helped Gorbachev draw up the terms for his retirement. “But what about me? He didn’t even take care of my pension. Tomorrow Mikhail Sergeyevich will deliver his farewell and we will be out of our posts. Where should I go to apply for my pension, which district office? Mikhail Sergeyevich is talking about his ‘RAND-type corporation’ and says, don’t worry there will be a place for everyone. He was very cheerful and optimistic. Money will flow he says. I don’t believe this and I don’t want it. I would like to feel free b
ut what money will I live on? I don’t have any savings.”[74]

  The “RAND-type corporation” is the foundation that Gorbachev plans to set up after retirement and that will in fact provide jobs for Chernyaev and other senior members of his staff after they leave the Kremlin.

  The Kremlin staff know that Gorbachev is already a wealthy man. One day last week he stunned Chernyaev and Alexander Yakovlev by confiding to them that he had received an $800,000 advance from a German publisher for his autobiography, Memoirs. “You know, Anatoly,” Gorbachev had said. “I want to keep $200,000 for myself and give you $30,000—40,000.” “There’s no need to do that, I don’t need that,” Chernyaev had replied. Yakovlev counseled Gorbachev to put aside about $600,000 for establishing the Gorbachev fund and to attract matching contributions from other donors. He and Chernyaev “with one voice” advised him not to give anything to various hospitals, as it would be wasted, and to hold on to a substantial sum, as “you have to live in dignity further on without going to Yeltsin asking for money.”[75]

  Gorbachev is well aware of his money-raising powers. On a visit to South Korea in April, President Roh Tae-woo proffered, and he accepted, an envelope containing $100,000, an extraordinary act on both their parts at a first meeting. Gorbachev gave the money to his chief of staff, Valery Boldin, for transfer to a children’s hospital.[76] He knows that after his retirement there will be an avalanche of requests for well-paid appearances and lectures from around the world.

  Chernyaev, a war veteran with full moustache under a pudgy nose, feels the indignities of being forced from office as much as Gorbachev. Like his boss, he is also about to become unemployed he believes. The ultimate loyal insider, he sees Gorbachev every day, plying him with memos on personnel and policy matters, sitting in on meetings with foreign leaders and taking notes, free to speak his mind and criticize. Always cheerful, never ruffled, he is the only official whom the very private Gorbachevs have taken regularly to their vacation dacha at Foros on the Black Sea, where he has ghostwritten much of Gorbachev’s books and essays extolling his reforms. The president’s English-language interpreter, Pavel Palazchenko, regards Chernyaev as the unsung hero of perestroika. Chernyaev’s pro-reform views were shaped during three years working in Czechoslovakia, where he saw Soviet tanks turning back the tide of reform in 1968.