On August 24, 1991, finally facing up to the fact that “the party’s over,” Gorbachev resigned as the sixth and last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the all-powerful organization that had been founded by Lenin and led by Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Though he remained president of the Soviet Union, he conceded that the party that elevated him to his post could not be reformed. He signed over the party’s vast holdings to the USSR Supreme Soviet, which voted to ban all party activities. All across the Soviet Union communist officials frantically burned and shredded documents that might incriminate them.
One important reason for the failure of the coup was the speed with which information spread about what was happening. The coup leaders had summoned television chief Leonid Kravchenko in the early hours of Monday morning to prepare the broadcast of the declaration of the state of emergency and impose tight control on news. But every editor and senior official in television headquarters at Gosteleradio, the state television and radio company, could watch CNN in their office. As the day went on, they learned from the American network and from their own reporters on the streets of the mounting resistance at the White House.
People around the country who had rigged up an aerial knew that the putsch was being opposed. Ekaterina Genieva, director of the Library of Foreign Literature, who used the facilities of her building near Taganskaya Square to bring out an anticoup news sheet, acknowledged that from the start “we knew what was happening in our country from the Western media.” “This was a hugely important story and time for CNN,” said Eason Jordan, then CNN international editor. “In a sense, CNN was a major factor in ensuring the Soviet coup failed.” CNN’s bureau was almost across the street from the Russian White House, and when Yeltsin made his dramatic stand on a tank, the pictures were sent via satellite to Atlanta, beamed back to Soviet television at Ostankino, and sent by microwave to the network’s subscribers in the Kremlin, the foreign ministry, and several hotels. Televisions around Moscow center could pick up the microwave relay.
On the morning of the coup, media analyst Lydia Polskaya pushed the button for the fourth channel where she could normally get CNN and was stunned to find the Americans reporting as usual. Nursultan Nazarbayev watched CNN round the clock from his office in Alma-Ata and was able to judge quickly that the junta did not merit his support. U.S. secretary of state James Baker acknowledged that the White House used CNN as the fastest source available to get its message of support for Yeltsin to Moscow. “Praised be information technology! Praised be CNN,” wrote Eduard Shevardnadze in Newsweek after the coup failed. “Anybody who owned a parabolic antenna able to receive this network’s transmissions had a complete picture of what was happening.”[172] The coup plotters were faced with insubordination from within Ostankino itself. News director Elena Pozdnyak refused an order to take out Yanayev’s trembling fingers and the derisive laughter of the journalists from the broadcast of the press conference.[173]
Gorbachev fired Kravchenko as head of state television, brushing aside his excuse that he had no alternative but to obey the emergency committee as Gosteleradio was under the guns of the KGB. The president asked his one-time friend Yegor Yakovlev, to whom he had not spoken for nearly a year, to take his place. The progressive former Moscow News editor astutely got Yeltsin’s blessing before accepting. Yakovlev restored banned programs, rehired journalists who had been dismissed for refusing to accept censorship, and started getting rid of the KGB spies posing as correspondents for the broadcasting organization in Russia and around the world.
One of Yegor Yakovlev’s priorities was to get Gorbachev onto international news broadcasts to demonstrate that he was still in business as Soviet leader. He found willing allies in CNN and ABC, which were competing in the aftermath of the coup to get access to Yeltsin and Gorbachev. Both presidents agreed to a request from ABC to appear at a joint televised “town hall” meeting in Moscow on Monday, September 2, conducted by Peter Jennings, to be shown in both Russia and the United States.
When ABC News president Roone Arledge boasted publicly that “this historic live broadcast will provide a forum for Americans from every part of the country to ask questions of these two leaders at this critical period of history,” the competitive CNN president, Tom Johnson, and Eason Jordan took the next flight from Atlanta to Moscow on August 29 to “snag the interviews.” To their delight, Yegor Yakovlev made Gorbachev available a day before the scheduled ABC program for an exclusive half-hour interview, conducted by Steve Hurst and also shown on Soviet television.
The interview was an opportunity for Gorbachev to boast of the restoration of his political fortunes. That day he had convened a meeting of the presidents of ten of the fifteen original Soviet republics, including Yeltsin, and they had agreed to form themselves into a state council, with Gorbachev at its head, that would revive talks on a new union treaty.
He was taking control again, he insisted. His new alliance with Yeltsin, he told CNN’s Hurst, was “unbreakable.”
Chapter 18
DECEMBER 25: DUSK
With less than sixty minutes left before his resignation address, Mikhail Gorbachev is at last mentally and physically ready. His speech has been printed out for him in large letters to read on air. He is satisfied that he has found the right tone to express his disappointment and feelings of betrayal by Yeltsin in a dignified manner.
While waiting, he gives Ted Koppel the benefit of a few more of his thoughts. Then as the ABC team goes out into the Kremlin corridor, he signals to Yegor Yakovlev and Andrey Grachev to stay. “Let’s have coffee,” he says.
The three sit at the oval table where Gorbachev likes to chat with visitors. Zhenya, the waiter, brings in a tray with coffee, pastries, and small open sandwiches.
Grachev senses that Gorbachev does not want to be left alone “with his thoughts, his undelivered speech and the nuclear suitcase which he would soon have to give up.”[174]
They discuss whether Gorbachev should sign his decree resigning the presidency of the Soviet Union before giving his televised address, or vice versa. Yakovlev advises him to do it after. He thinks it better that everyone watching television sees him doing it. It would add a moment of drama and finality. The more formalism there is to the event, the more it will be seen as a dignified exit.
They are all rather disheartened by the fact that no ceremony has been arranged by the incoming authorities for the first peaceful transition of power in Russian history.
As they sip their coffee, the conversation of the three men spontaneously turns to their apprehensions about what might happen to them in the future.
The fate of Nicolae Ceauşescu is not far from their minds. Two years ago—to the day—the Romanian communist leader and his wife, Elena, were executed by firing squad after an uprising against his totalitarian rule. Gorbachev regarded Ceauşescu with contempt as the “Romanian führer,” but they had maintained a high-profile relationship. Twenty days before the execution, Gorbachev had told Ceauşescu, who was visiting Moscow, that he had no reason to fear the collapse or the end of socialism, and they had agreed on a meeting of prime ministers on January 9. Gorbachev made a strange remark to the departing Ceauşescu. “You shall be alive on the ninth of January,” he said.[175] By that date Ceauşescu was dead.
Grachev voices a more realistic fear that the Yeltsin people will start a process to make Gorbachev the fall guy for the past, as the Germans have done to Erich Honecker. This is something that has been exercising the mind of Anatoly Chernyaev all week. Perhaps nothing will happen, he had written in his diary as the end neared. They are Russians, not Germans, after all, and already people are feeling sorry for Gorbachev. But this is not France either. Unlike de Gaulle, Gorbachev will never be allowed to return. So far everything has been done by civilized standards, but they have no guarantee that sometime in the future Yeltsin might not try to discredit them all to justify his destruction of the Union. Grachev asks Gorbachev whether he is concer
ned that somebody would try to get revenge on him by ferreting around in his past.
“I’m not worried,” replies Gorbachev, though he is aware that there have been attempts before to pin something on him for his lifestyle as first party secretary in Stavropol from 1970 to 1978. Eduard Shevardnadze told him once that in 1984, in the jostling for power in the Politburo before Chernenko died, officials at the interior ministry were instructed by a rival of Gorbachev to dig up compromising material on his Stavropol days.[176]
Gorbachev himself received a jolt two years ago when Andrey Sakharov took him aside to warn him of a plot to besmirch his name. Huddled together on chairs in a corner of the dimly lit stage in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses following a session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the former dissident confided to Gorbachev that he had evidence the nomenklatura, the Soviet Union’s high-ranking officials, were out to get him. The Nobel Prize—winning physicist was quite specific. “You are vulnerable to pressure, to blackmail, by people who control the channels of information. They threaten to publish certain information unless you do as they wish…. Even now they are saying you took bribes in Stavropol; 160,000 rubles has been mentioned.”[177] Gorbachev suspected that Yeltsin was behind the rumors, but Sakharov may have been referring to hardliners plotting to discredit the president and seize power.
Now that the issue has been raised again by Grachev, Gorbachev insists there is nothing for him to worry about. “My conscience is clear. Do you really think there could have been any very extraordinary privileges available in Stavropol? There were no special apartments, not even a special store. We bought our food at the canteen of the district party committee. Until recently Raisa Maximovna was keeping all our receipts.”
“And what about Krasnodar?” asks Grachev. “Krasnodar is right next door to you, and some incredible things went on there at Medunov’s.” There had been a notorious case of corruption in the Krasnodar region next to Stavropol involving the first secretary, Sergey Medunov, a favorite of Brezhnev’s. “Medunov, he’s something else again,” exclaims Gorbachev. “I read complaints against him myself, especially from the local Jewish population, bribes, extortion, and what orgies in the official dachas! He wasn’t afraid of anything. And for good reason. He had direct access to Brezhnev.”
As general secretary of the Communist Party from 1964 to 1982, Leonid Brezhnev was notorious for his love of expensive gifts and for his failure to investigate allegations of corruption against his most generous donors. After Brezhnev died in 1982, Gorbachev, by then a member of the Politburo, was instrumental in getting Medunov fired, along with corrupt USSR interior minister Nikolay Shchelokov. Gorbachev recalls for his companions that Shchelokov had given the orders to destroy him in retaliation. But it was the interior minister who was destroyed. Shortly after losing his post, Shchelokov was found dead, apparently of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
The Gorbachevs were, however, not above sending presents to Brezhnev themselves, according to Brezhnev’s daughter Galina. Two years earlier she told the Moscow television program Vzglyad that Raisa Gorbacheva gave expensive presents, including a necklace, to the Brezhnev family to win favor for her husband.[178] The episode of the program containing Galina’s allegation was banned by Kremlin officials for “aesthetic reasons.” An alcoholic who would end up in a psychiatric hospital, Galina was a suspect witness and had political reasons for discrediting the Gorbachevs. Her husband, Yury Churbanov, was arrested for taking bribes and jailed for six years after a trial that was widely interpreted as a sign from Gorbachev that political corruption would not be tolerated.
As party boss Gorbachev also received gifts, such as the velvet dressing gowns and sable hats pressed on him years earlier by the then Kazakh first secretary Dinmukhamed Kunayev, a Brezhnev loyalist whom Gorbachev subsequently accused of corruption. Some of the most lavish gifts ended up on the third-floor warehouse informally known as Aladdin’s Cave in Old Square, where top party members were required to deposit expensive gifts, though few rarely did, according to Valery Boldin. Gorbachev’s betrayer would later make unverifiable claims in his memoirs about Gorbachev keeping for himself valuable gifts of gold, silver, and platinum.[179]
While Grachev knows there is no serious case for Gorbachev to answer about Stavropol, there is potential embarrassment in the populist charges that Yeltsin has constantly made against him, his love of luxury as head of a supposedly egalitarian society. Even the steadfast Shakhnazarov found grossly offensive the sumptuous holiday dacha that Gorbachev commanded to be built at Foros with state funds for his exclusive use.
They suspect, rightly, that this will diminish as a sensitive issue in direct proportion to Yeltsin’s embrace of the perquisites of power after Gorbachev is gone.
Gorbachev’s aides worry more about what might be found in the files and archives that will fall into the possession of the new authorities. In the last few days they have employed three people, listed in Chernyaev’s diary as Weber, Yermonsky, and Kuvaldin, to cart sacks of paper to rooms they have rented in Razin Street and sift through them for any time bombs. Fearful that they might be locked out of the Kremlin at any time, Gorbachev has had crates of Politburo documents transferred to General Staff headquarters, and Chernyaev has taken some sensitive documents home for safekeeping, despite Grachev’s warning that he shouldn’t “exclude the possibility of a search of your place when they come up with a suit against Gorbachev.” Chernyaev does not believe it will come to that, but he is worried that if things do not go well for Yeltsin, he will have to look for people to blame. “I will be the first candidate as a witness,” he notes in his diary. “However there is nothing criminal or compromising in my archives. But to find something against Mikhail Sergeyevich is possible, especially as he was so frank in personal conversations.”[180]
Gorbachev was made aware of this danger as far back as August 23, the day the apparatchiks were ordered out of the Central Committee building after the collapse of the coup. A distraught senior party official, Valentin Falin, had called Gorbachev to ask him if he was in agreement with the ban just imposed on the Communist Party. When he said he was, Falin had pointed out that the safes of the Central Committee contained documents that were extremely delicate and affected him. Gorbachev replied that he was in an awkward position and could do nothing.
One positive consequence of the fall of the USSR, however, is that there will no longer be any Soviet institutions to bring charges against Gorbachev for violating the Soviet constitution.
Other members of Gorbachev’s staff have different concerns about retribution from the new crowd preparing to take over the Kremlin. Pavel Palazchenko worries about a comment he made to Ted Koppel on camera. He told the ABC interviewer that while he might not characterize the seizure of power by Yeltsin today as a coup d’etat, it is nevertheless “something that’s being done by democratically elected people in a less than democratic and fair way.” When it was broadcast on ABC television, a friend said, “only half-jokingly and perhaps quite seriously,” that he should perhaps ask the Americans for some kind of protection from Yeltsin.
As the last Soviet president ruminates about his past, a convoy of six white vans rented from Intercar is racing towards the Kremlin accompanied by the sirens and flashing lights of a police escort.
Having finished their televised interview with Boris Yeltsin in the Russian White House, the CNN crew has to get across town and set up transmission equipment in a very short time to broadcast Gorbachev’s last public act as president of the collapsing superpower and to complete the second leg of their exclusive coverage of the two leaders.
Senior CNN producer Charlie Caudill recalled a chaotic scene after the Yeltsin interview. “We break down all the equipment, load it into six vans, in thirty minutes. This is rush hour. We have to give ‘donations’ to the police and get a full red light screaming escort through the streets of Moscow. Tom and I are in the lead car. People probably think we are Yeltsin and Gorbachev.”[181]
&
nbsp; The interviewers, Steve Hurst and Claire Shipman, find themselves hustled into a police car that races along at the back of the convoy, its emergency lights flashing in the dark streets. “I never in my life thought that an American like me would be in a motorcade like that,” said Shipman, who has often seen official cars speeding down the “Zil lane” in the center of the highway that would “kill anyone who got in the way.”
The CNN cavalcade comes to a halt at the Borovitsky Gate of the Kremlin. Yeltsin’s new guards are unsure of their instructions and several times check by telephone with superior officers as the crew wait impatiently to be admitted. Eventually an official car appears to lead the line of vans into the Kremlin, past the Armory and the Great Kremlin Palace and across Kremlin Square to the Senate Building.
It is 5:35 p.m. before the army of technicians gets to the third-floor corridor. There they are directed to Room Number 4, where Gorbachev will make his address. This is a mock presidential office, furnished to look like the real office sixty feet away along the corridor, and used only for television interviews. It is sometimes called the “green room,” as its walls are sheathed in greenish oyster damask above burr-maple paneling.
CNN has an agreement with Gosteleradio that they will join forces to transmit the resignation address together live. The unique arrangement resulted from a meeting Tom Johnson and Stu Loory had with Gorbachev a few days back, when they presented him with the same CNN book on the coup that they had given Yeltsin. They proposed to the Soviet president that they would broadcast his resignation address live around the world and interview him immediately afterwards. Gorbachev had listened politely and asked Johnson about CNN’s global reach. He jokingly inquired if the network’s “empire is doing well now—it’s not being dismantled, is it?” “At the present time it is not, Mr. President,” replied Johnson. “Well, it means you have structured your empire quite well,” laughed Gorbachev, “but be sure to give enough power to your republics!” Knowing that their rivals from ABC had got a head start, they pleaded that while ABC’s American audience was much bigger, their audience levels spike incredibly for major news events. Yegor Yakovlev later called the CNN executives to say that Gorbachev had agreed to the live broadcast of his final address and an interview immediately afterwards.
Moscow, December 25, 1991 Page 21