Moscow, December 25, 1991

by Conor O'Clery

  Leaving his Kremlin post means losing much more than income for the seventy-year-old Chernyaev. He no longer will have the opportunity to combine family life at his home in Vesnina Street near Moscow University on the city’s western outskirts with visits to his mistress, Lyudmila Pavlovna, who lives conveniently close to the Kremlin in Malaya Gruzinskaya Street. Late in the evening, “having dropped off milk at home and having lied about where I was going,” Chernyaev would regularly hurry off to be with his beloved Lyuda. All he ever wanted, he notes in his diary, was to have a good life.

  He sees an irony in the fact that the coming of political freedom for Russia means a loss of his personal freedom to spend time with his lover. “I have to get used to ‘freedom,’” he writes in his diary. “But you can’t be free when you have family…. Would that I had enough strength to spit at everything and go to the woman I love, but the woman would want me always to be cheerful and assured, she would want me to have a good job, she would not want me to be like a dependant, or a poor person who comes for consolation.” He is also wary of competition for his mistress. Alexander Bovin, just dispatched to Israel by Gorbachev as the last Soviet ambassador, also tried to court Lyuda but, writes Chernyaev with satisfaction, “with little success.”

  Chernyaev is as licentious as his master is prudish. In 1972 he accompanied Gorbachev, then a young regional party secretary, on a trip to Amsterdam and dragged him to sex shops and into an adult cinema to watch an X-rated movie. Gorbachev “was embarrassed by what he saw, perhaps even revolted.” The future party leader kept tugging his aide’s sleeve and insisted instead on talking about how to fix the problems in Stavropol.[77]

  Lyuda is the final passion of the lothario who works with Gorbachev, the last woman who, as he puts it, graciously allows him one-night stands. Several years after leaving the Kremlin, the aging mandarin with high testosterone levels will publish a treatise about his obsession with the opposite sex, called Eternal Woman. In its pages Chernyaev muses among other things about how he could get an erection at some times and at other times not. “Now in the 77th year of life, this [penis] can give up any time,” he ruminates in the book. “And then that’s it. The old man is finished! Lyuda is gone! Love, happiness and the meaning of life all disappear. That’s it! Close the shop!” The publication earns him the title of “Playboy in the Kremlin” in a review by Gennady Gerasimov, published in Sovetskaya Belorussiya.[78]

  Yegor Yakovlev (no relation to Alexander Yakovlev) arrives in the Senate Building to help supervise the media coverage of Gorbachev’s resignation address. The former editor of the weekly Moscow News and now head of the state television and radio company, Gosteleradio, Yakovlev has a notorious temper, but around Gorbachev his avuncular face, with arched eyebrows, white hair, and outsize spectacles, is a comforting presence on the final day.

  Aware of the historical importance of recording Gorbachev’s last hours as president, Yakovlev has brought veteran Russian writer and filmmaker Igor Belyaev into the Kremlin to make his own documentary alongside the small ABC television crew.

  Belyaev and Gorbachev have known each other since they were at Moscow State University together. The documentary maker is deeply appreciative of what his fellow alumnus has achieved in liberalizing the communist state. He is close to Gorbachev and feels “like his ally, that I was helping him.” It occurs to him that they are both part of a lost generation, born too late to become war veterans and too early to become cosmonauts, for whom Gorbachev is “the figurehead, the main representative of our views, of what we essentially are.” He tells Gorbachev that he remembers him as little short of a dissident at university, though the president thinks this is overstating it. “Obviously I was not a dissident at all,” Gorbachev protests, “although I already felt a burgeoning criticism of our reality.”

  Gorbachev tells his old friend, “At this important point in history, the most important thing is to overcome it without blood, without reds fighting whites. Society is pregnant with an explosion. If, God forbid, there is political madness and score settling when people are suffering so much, there will be huge consequences.”[79]

  Yegor Yakovlev fears that the Belyaev narrative has little chance of being shown on Russian television because the pro-Yeltsin executives at Gosteleradio are highly sensitive to the perils of paying special attention to Gorbachev. “Television is being taken away from me,” Yakovlev complains helplessly to Gorbachev’s aides. “I am no longer master there. Yeltsin’s people are ruling the roost.”[80]

  It was Yegor Yakovlev who recommended that ABC be brought into the heart of the Kremlin in the final days. He advised the president to “pick one foreign network from all those demanding access to a moment of world history.” They settled on ABC Nightline as one of the most respected and influential U.S. television news programs. ABC also has a record of connecting Soviet leaders to American audiences, and Ted Koppel, who speaks Russian, has gotten to know Gorbachev and his aides quite well.

  For his part Gorbachev knows how popular he is in the United States and how useful it will be to have the world watching, via the lens of an American television camera, how the transition is being conducted. Who knows how the unpredictable Boris Yeltsin would behave otherwise.

  Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, from their different perspectives, see the United States as their ally in the dying days of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev has been cheered on by U.S. President George H. W. Bush, who would prefer the devil he knows—an intact and supplicant Soviet Union—to a chaotic group of new countries, some with nuclear weapons on their territory. Yeltsin is anxious to present the responsible face of the new Russia to the United States, as he needs its assistance to make the historic switch from communism to capitalism. Both are vying to influence American and global opinion for their own purposes and standing.

  No one is more surprised than Koppel himself that he has been allowed into the heart of the Kremlin, free to roam around and film in a sanctum of power to which correspondents rarely if ever get access. The chairman of ABC News, Roone Arledge, had sent him to Moscow in mid-December to try to grab an interview with Gorbachev before he resigned, if that was to be his fate. Instead Koppel had been offered exclusive foreign rights to record the last days in office of the Soviet president.

  Chernyaev encounters the ABC crew in Gorbachev’s outer office. He thinks how “shameful for us that only foreign television journalists were running around us representing the significance of Gorbachev for the whole world, a significance which the Western public fairly gives him…. If it wasn’t for Yegor Yakovlev bringing in ABC during those last days, who literally lived in the corridors filming everything they came across, there would have been an information blackout up to the very end of his presence in the Kremlin.”[81]

  Grachev believes that the president is also very conscious that these last days living in the Kremlin are part of world history and that was why he accepted the argument that it should be recorded for history. The fifty-year-old silver-haired veteran of the Communist Party’s international department has been by Gorbachev’s side since 1985, first as a foreign policy adviser and since the coup in August as his press secretary. He sees a comparison between Koppel and the American communist writer John Reed, who chronicled the 1917 October Revolution in his book Ten Days That Shook the World. According to Grachev, “The intention was that Koppel should be the John Reed of the day. Some seventy-four years earlier Reed witnessed the birth of Soviet Russia from the inside. Koppel came to witness the final hours of that Revolution.”[82]

  After a couple of days, observed Grachev, Kaplan and Koppel “blended into the walls of the Kremlin so completely that even the guards stopped paying attention to them.” The two Americans are surprised to find that Russian journalists are showing scant interest in Gorbachev’s departure. “They were really nervous being around Gorbachev,” recalled Kaplan. “They knew the Soviet Union was ended. The Soviets were leaving the Kremlin, and the Russians were getting ready to march in, and they want
ed to show allegiance to the next government.”

  They are also surprised at how little the Soviet president had to do of an official nature in his last days. Once when in the Kremlin with associate ABC producer Holly Petersen, Gorbachev said to Kaplan, “Come in, meet my cabinet.” They were brought into a big room to find his ministers sitting there, and Gorbachev gave him a two-hour interview in their presence. None of it ever got shown on television.

  The Americans at first reckoned on being back in the United States for the holidays, but having accepted the Kremlin’s offer of unlimited access, they are at the mercy of history’s timetable. The Nightline presenter swore to his family he would be home by Christmas Day, and when he broke the news that they were stuck in Moscow, “my wife didn’t speak to me for a day!”[83] Kaplan too finds himself in his family’s bad books. At one point he calls home using the satellite phone with unfolding dish he carries in a little briefcase. “My wife is yelling at me—it’s Christmas time, holidays, children on vacation!” Gorbachev overhears and offers to take the phone, saying in English, “I talk.” “You don’t want to do this!” replies Kaplan. Gorbachev asks, “Why is she angry?” Kaplan explains, “I am a week here, and I am still not going home.” Gorbachev laughs and says, “If it was me, Raisa would kill me!”[84]

  Gorbachev later borrows the satellite phone to call his own wife. Kaplan thinks that he takes it because he is wary about using his own telephone in the Kremlin. The Soviet president can trust no one now.

  Chapter 11

  KNEE DEEP IN KEROSENE

  With his name dominating global headlines after his election to the Soviet congress, Boris Yeltsin decided in late summer 1989 that it was time for him to see the world and look at how other systems worked. He accepted an invitation to go on a lecture tour sponsored by the secretive Esalen Institute, a Californian nonprofit “dedicated to the exploration of human potential” whose leaders were close to the U.S. administration.

  Visiting America for the first time turned out to be a life-changing experience for Yeltsin, revealing to him the human potential and dynamism of a different ideology.

  He was astonished by New York. As a construction expert he was awed at the majestic skyscrapers, and he marveled at the cheapness, quality, and speed of service in the restaurants. He found Americans “wonderfully open, sincere and friendly, industrious and intelligent.” He was mesmerized by the cornucopia of food in Randall’s Grocery Store, a supermarket in Houston, Texas, which he dropped into unannounced with his assistant Lev Sukhanov on his way to the airport after visiting the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. They had never seen such a store. It had 30,000 items, countless varieties of sausage, no queues, and a woman at the checkout reading the prices with a device like a hair dryer. There he had an epiphany. He concluded that the sole purpose of the Iron Curtain was to prevent Soviet citizens knowing what was on the other side, as it would be too much for them to endure.

  “Look to what limits we have brought our people,” he complained to Sukhanov as they flew on to Miami, deeply depressed at what he had seen. “We were told fables!” Sukhanov observed that “after Houston, in a plane provided by a millionaire, Yeltsin’s belief in the Bolshevik idea was finally destroyed. During those minutes he decided to leave the party and start fighting for supreme power in Russia.”[85]

  Yeltsin’s public lectures in the United States were well received, except for one scheduled at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on September 12. The Russian was drunk when he arrived late on September 11 aboard a private plane supplied by Rockefeller. “It was the most astonishing scene I have ever witnessed,” recalled his host in the United States, Jim Garrison, executive director of Esalen’s Soviet American Exchange Program, which engaged in nongovernmental diplomacy with Soviet counterparts. “The president of Johns Hopkins was there to greet Yeltsin, and a young lady with a bunch of roses. When he came down the steps, Yeltsin turned around and urinated on the back tire of the plane.” Yeltsin was bundled into his hotel, where he spent the night drinking Jack Daniels. He was so intoxicated the next morning he could hardly stand, said Garrison. An admirer of Gorbachev, Garrison came to dislike Gorbachev’s “forceful, primitive and highly erratic” rival, who was “completely consumed with a dark passion” for overthrowing the Soviet leader. Yeltsin managed to give his lecture but “with the students laughing at him, not with him.”[86]

  As Yeltsin was struggling through his speech at Johns Hopkins, the White House called to say that the Russian president, who had requested a meeting with President Bush, would be granted a session at 11:30 a.m. in the White House with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, with the possibility that Bush might “drop by.” Bush did not want to offend Gorbachev by giving his fiercest critic anything resembling a summit meeting in Washington, particularly at a time when he and the Soviet leader were working together to achieve a number of American goals, such as the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. The party drove at speed to Washington and arrived at 12:15 p.m. “Jim, you are late,” said Bush’s special assistant, Condoleezza Rice. “Condi, you have no idea,” replied Garrison.

  Yeltsin at first refused to enter the White House unless Bush would promise to meet him. He protested, “I am an important man in my country.” But when told Scowcroft would not wait, he crossed the threshold. The national security adviser greeted him truculently with the question “What is the meaning of your trip to Washington?” Yeltsin retorted, “You want to know the meaning of life?” The White House official and his deputy, Robert Gates, were treated to what Gates later described as an “excruciatingly monotonous presentation” from the boorish visitor. Scowcroft at one point closed his eyes as if sleeping.[87] When Vice President Quayle dropped by, Yeltsin stared at him hard and long without speaking until Quayle left, crushed. Bush at last appeared in the room. The Russian, suddenly stone cold sober, proceeded to give an earnest account of the situation back home. Later, White House sources told reporters that the visitor was a lightweight with no political future, who had made “off-the-wall” predictions about the Soviet Union’s collapse.

  Tipped off about the Russian’s behavior, the Washington Post published a colorful account of “Yeltsin’s Smashing Day.” It was lifted by Italian journalist Vittorio Zucconi and embellished for an article that appeared in the Italian tabloid newspaper La Repubblica on September 14. Zucconi wrote that, for Yeltsin, America was a bar 5,000 kilometers long and that he had drunk six bottles of spirits and numerous cocktails and embarked on a wild shopping spree. It was partly an invention, based on the Post article and the correspondent’s conception of how a full-blooded Russian might behave on his first visit to the United States. The La Repubblica article was brought to the attention of Gorbachev, who encouraged Pravda to republish it. It duly appeared on September 18 in the party organ, complete with every lurid detail.

  This latest attempt to discredit the people’s hero also backfired. Copies of Pravda were burned in Red Square by irate Muscovites who saw it as another dirty trick to pull down the one politician they felt they could trust. Three days later, after Pravda editorial staff had checked out the story themselves and found it to be partly invented, the paper was forced to apologize—the first ever retraction by the communist flagship.

  Later, however, after Yeltsin returned to Moscow, Soviet television obtained footage of him slurring his words at the Baltimore event. Under orders from Gorbachev’s aides, the progressive head of state television, Mikhail Nenashev, was forced to broadcast it nationwide at prime time, though he was against putting it on air at all and took care to include shots of Yeltsin arriving home with a gift of 100,000 disposable syringes for hospitals.[88] Yeltsin claimed the tape was deliberately slowed down by the KGB to make him look intoxicated, though even his supporters inside Soviet television doubted that this was true. Nevertheless, the episode deepened Yeltsin’s hatred for Gorbachev and Gorbachev’s contempt for his adversary.

  A week after the Pravda story appeared, Yelts
in found himself at the center of another embarrassing controversy.[89] Sometime after ten o’clock on the exceptionally cold, dry evening of September 28, he appeared soaking wet at the guard post of the Uspenskoye government dacha compound. He told the militiamen there that he had dismissed his driver and was walking the last three hundred meters to visit an old friend, carrying a bunch of flowers, when unidentified men threw him off a bridge into the Moscow River. Alerted by one of the militiamen, his daughter Tanya telephoned Alexander Korzhakov, who grabbed some warm clothes, a bottle of spirits, and some apples and drove to the militia post in his Niva. Yeltsin’s security chief found his boss lying motionless by an electric heater. He was blue with cold, “as if ink was poured over him,” and wearing only wet briefs. His suit was hanging on a nail with blood and grass stains.

  Yeltsin told him that after his official car was driven off, four big men shoved him into the back of a red Zhiguli and dropped him from the bridge with a sack tied over his head. He would have drowned if he had not managed to free himself.

  The guards made a report, and Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin took note of Yeltsin’s statement. Two weeks later Bakatin recounted the story to the Supreme Soviet, with Gorbachev in the chair. There was a flurry of press interest, with speculation ranging from the possibility that Yeltsin was visiting his mistress—a a cook in a dacha whose occupant was away—and that she had doused him with a bucket of water (the cook denied an affair), or that there was a KGB plot to kill or embarrass him, or even that he had showed up uninvited at a birthday party in Nikolay Ryzhkov’s nearby dacha, which Gorbachev was attending, and KGB guards had been told to teach him a lesson. Looking back years later, Korzhakov was still at a loss about what happened. The river was only a meter deep, he recalled. “It was a joke to think he would have drowned, and Yeltsin was telling me the water was over his head.”[90]