Moscow, December 25, 1991

by Conor O'Clery

  Gorbachev taunted Yeltsin about the incident in a televised exchange at the Supreme Soviet. But most people in Moscow preferred again to give Yeltsin the benefit of the doubt. He was a flesh-and-blood Russian, one of them, who drank hard, fell into rivers, spoke out, and took the consequences. The more he was attacked by the organs of communism, the more were ordinary Muscovites convinced that he was their man.

  On the evening of December 14, 1989, Andrey Sakharov, the intellectual force for change in Russia who complemented Yeltsin’s crude political force, died from a heart attack. The former dissident was eulogized by a guilty nation that realized it had lost its moral compass. His body was laid out in the Academy of Sciences building, and tens of thousands of mourners queued in heavy snow to file past the bier.[91] Gorbachev and other Politburo members came and stood briefly to pay their respects to the honest scientist whom they had kept in internal exile as a dissident. Boris Yeltsin stood motionless for several minutes by his body, as if absorbing Sakharov’s spirit and acknowledging his own new role as undisputed leader of the opposition in a fast-changing Russia. Yeltsin was now the most prominent member of a loose collection of elected radicals known as the Interregional Group of Deputies, which had held some chaotic, freewheeling sessions since it was formed in a Moscow hotel lobby during the summer to press for speedier reform.

  Before Sakharov was interred in the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery, over 100,000 people attended a funeral rally in a slushy car park at which calls for the end of the Communist Party’s monopoly predominated. Commuters in a passing train opened windows to shout and wave encouragement. The public mood was becoming more defiant of authority. Such displays boded ill for a party that relied on control of an apathetic people to remain in power.

  Gorbachev pressed on with the reform process. He encouraged the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union to hold their own democratic elections to make their leaders more accountable to the people. Parliaments already existed in each republic, but the poll results were always fixed by the communist bosses, and the legislatures had little power to legislate.

  Individual elections for all the republics were scheduled for March 4, 1990. The campaign in Russia was marked by enormous pro-democracy rallies in support of Yeltsin as a candidate for the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies. For the first time prerevolutionary Russian flags and anticommunist slogans appeared among the demonstrators. Fear of the KGB and police was rapidly evaporating. Things had gone too far for repression of political views, especially when the electoral process bore the stamp of party approval.

  Over 8,000 candidates stood for 1,068 seats in the Russian congress. Gorbachev joked as he and Raisa cast their ballots that he had set up a party committee at his home to decide whom to support. He also warned reporters that the process had its limits. To split up the Soviet Union would risk the type of chaos that accompanied the Cultural Revolution in China.

  Boris Yeltsin ran in Sverdlovsk District Number 74. He advocated an elected president, a multiparty system, and a separate central bank and military units for the Russian republic. As for other republics like Lithuania, which were pressing for secession, let them leave the Union if they wished, he declared. This would weaken the center and give the Russian people a greater ability to decide their own fate. It would also weaken Gorbachev, who commanded the center, an outcome that Yeltsin found equally, if not more, attractive.

  Greeted by wildly enthusiastic fans everywhere he went, Yeltsin was elected with 84 percent of the vote in his constituency, defeating eleven other candidates. He had drawn on a deep well of discontent with the failure of communism to feed and clothe its people adequately and on the perception that Russia was exploited by the other fourteen republics, where people lived better lives.

  In response, Gorbachev resolved to strengthen and secure his own power. He persuaded the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies to select by secret ballot a president of the Soviet Union for a five-year term—himself, of course—followed by direct nationwide elections for future presidents. Gorbachev got himself selected to the presidency at a special session in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on March 15, 1990, but with only 59 percent support—mainly because of a partial boycott. The narrowness of the vote drew gasps of astonishment. Vitaly Korotich speculated that in the secret ballot many party apparatchiks who paid lip service to perestroika had ganged up with radicals to vote against Gorbachev. The former saw Gorbachev as Allende, the latter as Pinochet.

  The day after the vote, Gorbachev returned to the congress and took an oath to the constitution of the USSR at a table flanked by a ten-foot-long red flag with a golden hammer and sickle and a gold-bordered red star in its upper canton, the official emblem of the USSR. He got the briefest of standing ovations and retreated upstairs for a quiet glass of champagne with Raisa and aide Georgy Shakhnazarov. He was now President Gorbachev, head of state, the leader of the party in what was still a one-party state, commander in chief of the armed forces, and the chief executive of one of the world’s two superpowers. He ordered the KGB security service to ensure that in future the red flag be placed in a special floor holder next to him wherever he might be, in the manner of American presidents. He had the words “Sovetsky Soyuz” (Soviet Union) painted on the side of the presidential plane. He set up a presidential council to which he appointed longtime aides, including Valery Boldin, whom he also promoted to chief of staff.[92]

  Paradoxically, Gorbachev had less authority than ever. He was tainted now by retaining the leadership of the discredited Communist Party, whose Stalinist institutions were proving allergic to change, and this deepened his unpopularity. He was becoming isolated in a shrinking middle ground. He was even under surveillance from his own secret police, a conclusion reached by Korotich after a bizarre incident in the Kremlin. Gorbachev summoned the editor to his office and threw a tantrum about Ogonyok’s “unfair” coverage of Ligachev, “but as he screamed, his eyes remained calm and benign, and Alexander Yakovlev sat by, grinning.” It was done for show. “I’m convinced he was bugged,” said Korotich, “and that he knew it.”[93]

  Gorbachev’s popularity suffered more after April 9, when Soviet troops used sapper’s spades and gas to attack a peaceful nationalist demonstration in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, resulting in twenty deaths. Gorbachev claimed that the decision to use force was made by the Georgian leadership without consulting him, and years later he would blame Soviet defense minister Dmitry Yazov for giving the order to a local general. Many did not believe him, especially when later that month in Sverdlovsk he hardened his stance against nationalism, vowing that he would never let the Baltics leave the Soviet Union. He also blustered in the same speech that Yeltsin was finished as a politician.

  But it was Gorbachev who was in decline. The new Soviet president was humiliated on May 1, 1990, when the pro-reform Moscow Club of Electors joined the end of the official May Day parade in Red Square. After the usual disciplined march of grateful workers chanting official slogans, thousands of raucous, angry, disrespectful Muscovites appeared carrying banners reading, “Gorbachev, resign” and “Down with the cult of Lenin.” Marchers with Lithuanian and Ukrainian flags stopped in front of Gorbachev to whistle and jeer. The benign expressions on the faces of the Politburo members on the Lenin Mausoleum turned to granite.

  State television always continued live coverage of Red Square parades as long as the leaders remained on the Mausoleum. Now, these mortifying scenes were being broadcast to 150 million viewers across the USSR. The transmission was only stopped when a television director ran screaming into the studio to shut it down. After a few minutes of confusion, Gorbachev led his comrades off the platform, his shoulders hunched and his fedora hat pulled down, and ordered an investigation of the “political hooligans.” His flirtation with the democrats was over.

  Raisa Gorbacheva felt the anger not just of the democrats but of the party conservatives who believed her husband was destroying their careers. When she went to the district party committee to pa
y her dues, she was appalled at the local party secretary’s spiteful attitude towards her. “I really feel he hated us,” she confided to Pavel Palazchenko. “They will never forgive Mikhail Sergeyevich.”[94]

  Yeltsin meanwhile was being carried forward on a wave of pro-Russian nationalism. On May 17, 1990, a damp, overcast late spring day, the first freely elected Russian congress since before the Revolution met in the Great Kremlin Palace. The interior was dominated by the immense, theatrical picture by Boris Ioganson, Lenin’s Speech at the Third Congress of the Komsomol. The white, blue, and red flag of the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky, which briefly ruled Russia in 1917, was carried into the debating chamber, and deputies responded with a standing ovation of several minutes. The tricolor, which originated as a naval and military ensign at the end of the seventeenth century in imitation of the Dutch colors and was first recognized as the flag of Russia in 1896, was banished after the October Revolution. More than anything else, its reappearance symbolized the beginning of the end of the seven-decades-long experiment in social engineering based on Karl Marx’s idea of a workers’ state. A couple of years earlier, people would have been arrested for displaying it.

  Most of the deputies were party members, with views ranging from neo-Stalinist to radical democrat, but almost all were united in a desire to carve out greater sovereignty for Russia within the Soviet Union.

  Yeltsin put himself forward for election as chairman of the presidium, in effect Russia’s head of state. Gorbachev let it be known he favored Alexander Vlasov, an uninspiring government functionary who was less threatening as a political rival. Though not an elected member, Gorbachev came to the Russian chamber to intimidate the deputies by his presence. He insisted that the president’s flag of the Union be placed beside him on a ten-foot pole to symbolize his new status. The only seat where the flag could be accommodated was in the balcony perched high above the chamber like a royal box. From there Gorbachev descended at intervals to lecture deputies on the risks of voting for his former comrade. From the podium he accused Yeltsin of abandoning socialist principles and working for the destruction of the Soviet Union.

  In the congress 40 percent of deputies were solidly for Yeltsin and 40 percent against. The remaining 20 percent—known as the “swamp”—resented Gorbachev’s interference and leaned to Yeltsin. On May 29 the Siberian won a secret ballot with 535 votes, 4 more than the absolute majority required. For the first time Gorbachev had failed to get his preferred candidate elected for a leadership post in the Soviet Union.

  Gorbachev learned the result while reclining in one of the leather seats of the blue and white Soviet presidential airliner midway across the Atlantic, en route to Ottawa and a summit meeting in Washington with President Bush. His aides drafted a conciliatory telegram of congratulations, acknowledging, “You have shown yourself to be a real fighter.” Gorbachev rejected it, saying Yeltsin didn’t need that kind of backhanded compliment.[95] Though he conceded that they were now going to have to negotiate with Yeltsin, he didn’t congratulate the winner for a week.

  In the United States, President Bush received Gorbachev at the White House, and they traveled together by helicopter the fifty miles to Camp David. They were hemmed in by two plainclothes officers: an American air force major with a metallic Zero Halliburton briefcase in a black leather casing strapped to his wrist and a Russian colonel with a little black suitcase also attached to his forearm—the respective doomsday devices for the two presidents to launch nuclear war against each other.

  At Camp David Gorbachev drove Bush around in a golf cart. His driving was on a par with Yeltsin’s: He almost overturned it to avoid a tree, as the colonels careened along behind them. Over a lunch of hot sorrel soup, Bush asked Gorbachev about Yeltsin’s new role in Soviet politics. Yeltsin is not a “serious person,” retorted the Soviet president. “He’s become a destroyer.”[96]

  The destroyer was meanwhile enjoying his spoils. After his election as chairman of the Russian parliament, Yeltsin and his loyal sidekick, Lev Sukhanov, took the lift to the fifth floor of the Russian White House to occupy the office of the previous titleholder. They were amazed to find it was as big as a dance hall. “I have seen many an office in my life,” Yeltsin related, “but I got a pleasant tingle from the soft modern sheen, all the shininess and comfort.” Sukhanov said in wonderment, “Look Boris Nikolayevich, what an office we’ve seized!” Yeltsin had a subversive thought that frightened him. “We haven’t just seized an office. We’ve seized an entire Russia!” His campaign against perks notwithstanding, he soon took over for his own use a well-staffed mansion previously used as a vacation retreat of the Russian Council of Ministers in Arkhangelskoye.

  On settling into work, Yeltsin dismissed the KGB guards assigned to the office and installed his ex-KGB pal Alexander Korzhakov at the head of a new security unit. For the first few days the corridors outside his vast office were strangely quiet. The staff of the old administration went into hiding, expecting that Yeltsin would fire them too and put in his own people. Yeltsin called the employees together and told them he would keep them on if they wished. Most stayed.

  There was a whiff of cordite in the air as the confrontation with Gorbachev sharpened. Yeltsin and his staff began acquiring weapons for personal protection, helped by sympathizers in the Soviet defense and interior ministries. Within a year, he later reckoned, his security directorate had collected sixty assault rifles, a hundred pistols, two bulletproof jackets, and five Austrian walkie-talkies.

  Though leader of a country almost twice the size of the United States, Yeltsin had little power. He could not raise taxes. He had no army. He was unable to speak to the people on state television, which was still controlled by the Kremlin. Glasnost had not advanced to the point at which political opponents of the USSR leadership could command time on the airwaves. The Russian Supreme Soviet remained what it had always been—a decoration, part of a Soviet-era fiction that republics governed themselves, whereas in reality they had no control over people or resources.

  Yeltsin and his deputies were determined to change that. They hoped to take some power away from the center and establish enough sovereignty to get Russia out of its economic crisis. He proposed that Russia’s laws should be made superior to Soviet laws and take precedence in the territory of Russia, a popular move even with the conservative Russian deputies. “There were numerous options,” Yeltsin recounted, “but we had only one—to win!”

  On June 12, 1990, the parliament adopted a Declaration of Sovereignty of the RSFSR by a vote of 907 votes to 13 against and 9 abstentions. The vote was greeted by a standing ovation. The date would be celebrated in the future as Russia Day. Yeltsin would reflect in time that “as soon as the word sovereignty resounded in the air, the clock of history once again began ticking and all attempts to stop it were doomed. The last hour of the Soviet empire was chiming.”

  All over the USSR in the weeks that followed, other republics took their cue from Russia and proclaimed their sovereignty in a wave of nationalism. In many republics the campaign for greater independence was supported not just by nationalists but by hard-line members of the communist nomenklatura, who fretted about Gorbachev’s reform policies and aimed to grab power for themselves.

  Gorbachev’s perestroika had by now created a situation in which the USSR could be preserved only by a new union treaty or by military force.

  The immensity of what was happening gave Yeltsin “a bad case of the shakes.” The system could no longer crush him openly, he believed, but “it was quite capable of quietly eating us, bit by bit.” It could sabotage his actions, and him. Gorbachev still controlled the KGB, the interior ministry, the foreign ministry, the Central Bank, state television, and other instruments of control. He was commander of the armed forces, the ultimate arbiter in a physical struggle for power.

  But Gorbachev was losing the people. By mid-summer 1990, most Russians had stopped paying heed to his speeches. Life was not improving. After five years w
aiting for a “crucial turning point” that was never reached, people were dismissing his lectures as mnogo slov (“so many words,” “a lot of hot air”). Behind his back party secretaries were calling him Narciss, the Narcissist. (Gorbachev’s secretaries termed Yeltsin “Brevno,” or The Log, the Russian equivalent of “thick as a plank.”)[97] The shops and liquor stores were still empty.

  When Gorbachev made a typically long-winded address to the Twenty-eighth Congress of the Communist Party in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on July 2, 1990, almost nobody was listening. “There are voices which say that in all our failures perestroika is to blame—this is simply rubbish,” he said, his eyes glinting behind steel-rimmed spectacles as he surveyed the rows of fidgeting party officials and hard-jawed military generals among the delegates. “The abandoned state of our farms… the massive ecological problems… the national and ethnic problems… have not arisen yesterday but have their roots in the past…. We must continue with perestroika.” He got five seconds of desultory applause.

  It was Gorbachev’s turn to sit stone-faced as Yegor Ligachev, Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov, and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov—whom Gorbachev had appointed in the belief that he was a reformer—won thunderous applause as one after another they denounced “antisocialist elements” in the party. Their real target was Gorbachev himself, who privately admitted to Shakhnazarov not long before that he was “close to social democracy.”[98] For communists, there was nothing worse than a social democrat.