Knowing how prickly Yeltsin could be, and worried he might suspect an ambush of some sort, Grachev went to ask Yeltsin, too, for permission. As Yeltsin emerged from the elevator, flanked by his wary and unsmiling bodyguard, Korzhakov, Grachev inquired if the camera crews could record his arrival. “Out of the question, otherwise I’ll cancel the meeting,” snorted Yeltsin. Grachev signaled to the television people to leave. There was no doubting whose wishes must be obeyed, even in the precincts of Gorbachev’s own office.
Koppel remembered the Russian leader glowering as he walked towards the office. He felt that Yeltsin was angry at him. “I was paying all this attention to Gorbachev. He felt I should be seeking him out. He was the new boy in town. This was his moment; he was absorbing all the power. It was bleeding through Gorbachev’s hands minute by minute.”
In an interview not long before, Yeltsin had bluntly told Koppel his opinion of Gorbachev: “To a large extent, I don’t like him.”
Yeltsin waited until the reporters left before he would even cross the threshold into Gorbachev’s sanctum.
Zhenya, the Kremlin waiter, brought in a tray with coffee, cups, shot glasses, and two bottles, vodka for Yeltsin and Jubilee cognac for Gorbachev, “to go with the coffee,” as Chernyaev observed dryly. After some small talk they took their jackets off and in shirt sleeves and ties moved to the adjacent Walnut Room. It was in this same room on March 11, 1985, the day after the death of Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko, that the Politburo of the Communist Party agreed to make Mikhail Gorbachev general secretary of the party and undisputed leader of the Soviet Union.
Sitting beneath alabaster chandeliers at the end of the long teakwood table with fifteen chairs, the two antagonists discussed the implications of the agreement reached at Alma-Ata. Gorbachev was angry and heavy-hearted but resigned. As Grachev put it, “There was no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube.”
Gorbachev conceded to Yeltsin that for the sake of peace and order he would publicly accept the CIS as the constitutional successor to the Soviet Union. Yeltsin listened attentively to his warnings about the dangers of Balkanization. He in turn asked Gorbachev to lend him his support for the next six months, or at least not criticize him, while he imposed shock therapy on Russia.
It was inevitably going to be a tense encounter. Gorbachev’s aide Georgy Shakhnazarov noted that it was not in Gorbachev’s character to be humble nor in Yeltsin’s to be magnanimous. The two agreed to invite Alexander Yakovlev to “referee” the meeting.
The sixty-eight-year-old father of glasnost came limping into the room. He was intrigued to be there. It meant that he would be a witness “not only to the beginning but also to the end of the lofty career of Mikhail Gorbachev.” Like his mentor, the former ambassador to Canada and cheerleader for perestroika did not want to see the Soviet Union broken up, and he was opposed to what Yeltsin had done. Nevertheless, the Russian president respected him for his courageous role during the coup and for his campaign to expose the crimes of Stalin. In October Yeltsin had appointed Yakovlev to chair a commission for the rehabilitation of victims of political repression.
The two presidents agreed on a transition timetable. Gorbachev would abdicate two days later, on December 25. He would broadcast his resignation speech to the nation at seven o’clock in the evening of that day. After finishing his address, he would sign the decrees resigning as president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and giving up his position as commander in chief of the Soviet armed forces. Immediately after that, Yeltsin would come to his office with Defense Minister Shaposhnikov and take possession of the nuclear suitcase. Gorbachev and his staff could continue using their Kremlin offices for a further four days after Gorbachev’s resignation, until December 29, to conduct unfinished business and clear out their desks, after which Yeltsin would move in with his staff as president of Russia. The red flag would come down from the Kremlin on December 31.[240] Shakhnazarov, who was called into the meeting briefly, would tell Gorbachev’s assembled staff of aides, officials, interpreters, receptionists, typists, and researchers the next day that they had to leave the Kremlin on December 29, and that the presidential apparatus would stop functioning on January 2.[241]
In return for all this, Gorbachev would step down gracefully, not challenge Yeltsin’s right to succeed him, and stay out of the political fray to give the Russian president a clear run to implement his economic reforms.
Once the basics were settled, the heads of Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s secretariats, Grigory Revenko and Yury Petrov, were brought in to take notes on the nitty-gritty of Gorbachev’s future welfare.
“Gorbachev submitted a list of claims—his compensation package—that ran to several pages,” claimed Yeltsin later. “Almost all the items were purely material demands. He wanted a pension equaling a presidential salary, indexed to inflation; a presidential apartment and dacha; a car for himself and his wife. But more than anything he wanted a foundation, a big building in the center of Moscow, the former Academy of Social Sciences, and with it car service, office equipment, and security guards. Psychologically his reasoning was very simple: If you want to get rid of me so badly, then be so good as to dig deep into your pockets.”
Yeltsin agreed that the Gorbachevs could see out their retirement in a smaller state dacha and apartment, with two official cars and twenty staff, including security, drivers, cooks, and service personnel. He declined to authorize a separate ex-president’s office and staff, and he cut back the amount of pension requested and the number of bodyguards. He signed a decree giving Gorbachev a pension equivalent to his salary of 4,000 rubles a month—ten times the average Soviet wage but a mere $40 at the official rate of exchange. The arrangement would not leave Gorbachev in penury. He was already wealthy from advance royalties for his memoirs.
Next they settled on provisions for Gorbachev’s inner circle. They agreed to set up a bilateral commission headed by Revenko and Petrov to find jobs for Gorbachev’s displaced staff. The Soviet president asked Yeltsin to allow his associates Ivan Silayev and Shakhnazarov to buy their state dachas at reasonable prices. Silayev was the last prime minister of the Soviet Union, an office that had been defunct since the coup, and Shakhnazarov had been by Gorbachev’s side throughout the last turbulent years. The Russian president agreed. Turning to Yakovlev, he offered him the same deal. Yakovlev declined. He regretted his decision in years to come, as property prices in Moscow soared.
The terms Yeltsin agreed to with Gorbachev were on a par with legislation passed by the USSR Supreme Soviet over a year earlier. This provided for a pension and state-owned dacha with the necessary staff, bodyguard, and transport for the president on leaving office. They were also remarkably similar to those granted in 1964 to Nikita Khrushchev, the only other Soviet leader to be ousted from power. Khrushchev, another would-be reformer, was sacked by the Politburo for alleged policy failures and erratic behavior. He was given a pension and was allowed to remain in his general secretary’s mansion and his city apartment for a year after his departure, before moving to a smaller state mansion. But Khrushchev was made a nonperson. He simply disappeared from public view. His name did not appear again in Moscow newspapers until he died seven years later. This distressed him deeply. He spent days weeping bitterly. Asked once what Khrushchev did in retirement, his grandson replied, “He cries.” Gorbachev would not become a nonperson, but he too would shed a tear before the day was out.
The two adversaries, Yakovlev recalled, managed up to this point to conduct a very business-like and mutually respectful meeting. “They argued sometimes but without any rancor. I was very sorry they did not start cooperating at that level of mutual understanding before.” He thought whisperers on both sides had helped poison the atmosphere between them.
At one o’clock Zhenya delivered lunch to the three men. They helped themselves to salads and salami, potato and cabbage pies, and bottles of fizzy mineral water. When the waiter emerged with his empty cart, aides to both presidents quizze
d him about how they were getting on. He told them the meeting seemed to have got off to a civilized start.
With the material terms of the transition agreed, Revenko and Petrov left. Only Yakovlev would witness what transpired next.
Gorbachev produced for Yeltsin a certificate giving him control over the Archives of the General Secretary. This was a collection of between 1,000 and 2,000 files that contained secret documents passed on by Soviet leaders from the time of the founding of the state by Lenin. They were known to senior Soviet officials as the Stalinskiye Arkhivy, the Stalin Archives.
Though many of the crimes of past communist leaders had been acknowledged for the first time under Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, the top secret documents still held proof of criminal actions at the highest levels of Soviet power, most of which had never been admitted publicly. They implicated recent Soviet leaders in the cover-up and denials of the Stalin terror, and many other bloody episodes that would sustain charges that, in the past, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a vast criminal conspiracy and was implicated in international terrorism.
Every general secretary received the archives on taking office. They all knew, or could find out, what secrets they concealed.
One of the files handed over by Gorbachev detailed a plan to send a ship with arms to the left-wing Official Irish Republican Army at a time when the illegal group was conducting a campaign of bombing and killings in Northern Ireland. Called “Operation Splash,” it was approved by Politburo member and KGB chief Yury Andropov in response to a request from Irish Communist Party leader Michael O’Riordan, who claimed he was in secret contact with the Official IRA. A memo signed by Andropov on August 21, 1972, authorized the submerging of a consignment of captured German weapons, including two machine guns, seventy automatic rifles, ten Walther pistols, and 41,600 cartridges, in the Irish sea off the Northern Ireland coast, to be hauled up later by the “Irish friends” in a fishing boat. A reconnaissance ship, Reduktor, had already picked the spot and sounded the depths, Andropov noted. Yeltsin was later unable to say if Operation Splash succeeded but concluded that quite possibly “our ‘friends’ once again made themselves known with their trademark explosions and murders, causing the whole world to shudder.”[242]
Gorbachev then pushed back his chair and went to his office safe, from which he extracted two large envelopes tied with string and with broken wax seals. There was one document they should inspect first, he said when he resumed his seat. He began reading the contents to his two companions. It was a memo, dated March 5, 1940, from Lavrenty Beria, head of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, which recommended the execution of 25,700 Polish prisoners in Katyn Forest near Smolensk. Written on it in Stalin’s blue pencil were the words, “Resolution of the Politburo,” and the signatures of Stalin, Molotov, Mikoyan, and Voroshilov. Gorbachev also read aloud a deposition from Alexander Shelepin, former head of the KGB. In 1959 Shelepin had given the total number of Polish victims shot in 1940 as 21,857, and proposed to Khrushchev the destruction of all incriminating documents.[243]
The file was conclusive evidence that the Politburo ordered the slaughter of the Polish officers. For five years after Gorbachev took office, it had been Soviet practice to continue the postwar fiction of blaming the Germans for carrying out the mass killings after they invaded the USSR in 1941. In April 1990 the exhumation of bodies and other circumstantial evidence had compelled Gorbachev to admit the truth, but only partially. He authorized the Soviet news agency TASS to express profound regret to Poland for Stalin’s “heinous crime,” as if Stalin had acted alone.
Gorbachev had never conceded that the evidence existed of full Politburo approval of one of the worst crimes in European history. Here at last was the absolute proof of the complicity not just of Stalin and the notorious Beria but of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Yakovlev listened with a growing sense of anger. As a historian, he had been seeking these papers everywhere. He concluded at once that Gorbachev knew all along about their existence but had kept them from him.
“Gorbachev in my presence gave Yeltsin the package with all the documents on Katyn [and] when the envelope was opened it turned out that they were notes about the shooting of Polish military and civilians,” he wrote later. “Gorbachev was sitting there stone-faced as if nothing was ever discussed on that matter. Time and time again I asked in the general department of the Central Committee which documents are in the Politburo archives regarding this, and I got the same response each time—there is nothing.” He was bewildered at finding evidence that Gorbachev withheld such material over the years. “Gorbachev would have gained politically and morally if he made them public; he didn’t have good judgment of people but he was an even worse judge of himself.”
Gorbachev subsequently claimed that he had only received the incriminating documents the previous evening from Revenko, who had his attention drawn to them by the director of the archives and insisted that the president look at them. By Gorbachev’s account, it took his breath away to read “this hellish paper which condemned to death thousands of people at a single stroke.”[244]
His former chief of staff, Valery Boldin, would claim in his memoir that he had shown the documents in question to Gorbachev more than two years earlier, prior to a visit to Poland, and that his boss told him not to show them to anyone else, saying, “This is a hanging matter.”[245] Archive annotations show that in 1989 Boldin did open the file containing the Politburo order to shoot the Poles and that every Soviet leader since Stalin, and not excluding Gorbachev, had read the secret file and knew the truth. According to Gorbachev, the two sets of documents Boldin showed him simply related to a Stalin-era commission pinning the blame for the massacre on the Nazis.
Chernyaev would later take the charitable view that Boldin was trying to discredit Gorbachev and doubted that Gorbachev ever did see the execution command.
The three men agreed that the “smoking gun” documents would have to be delivered to the Poles. “I’m afraid they can lead to international complications. But now this is your mission, Boris Nikolayevich,” said Gorbachev, handing them over. Yeltsin would release the documents to the Russian media the following October.[246]
The rest of the secret files were stuffed into boxes. “Take it—now it’s all yours,” said Gorbachev. Yeltsin signed the receipt. Yakovlev was later “dumbfounded” to discover that they included secrets that even he, with his research into Bolshevik atrocities, had not imagined. Among them was an order signed by Lenin for the execution of 25,000 Russian Orthodox priests in the civil war of 1918 to 1921, though it is doubtful if this was carried out. All Russians knew that Stalin’s hands were bloody, but many revered Lenin as the father of the nation and did not associate him with mass killings.
The man who had presided over the Soviet Union for the previous six years asked about his own immunity from prosecution. “If you are worried about something, confess it now, while you are still president,” said Yeltsin.[247] Gorbachev did not take him up on his offer.
Next Gorbachev turned to the question of the foundation he was setting up in Moscow to give him a public service role after his resignation. He had already told his aides it would be “a powerful intellectual center that will initiate the process of establishment in Russia of a really democratic society, and if necessary the center will take the role of a powerful opposition against those dilettantes and self-satisfied mediocrities.”
Here in the Walnut Room, using less provocative language, he explained that the foundation would be a nongovernment organization for the study of economics and politics. He needed a suitable building for what he would call the Fund for Social and Political Research. Yeltsin objected to the phrase “political research.” He did not want a hostile foundation nosing around in Russian government affairs. Gorbachev insisted that it would not be turned into “a breeding ground for the opposition.” The exchange became heated, until Yakovlev came up with a compromise. “Let’s call it the Fund for Soci
al and Political Studies,” he suggested. They eventually agreed on the title: The International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies (The Gorbachev Foundation).[248]
Yeltsin was still leery about Gorbachev’s intentions. “You won’t create an opposition party on the basis of the foundation, will you?” he asked. Gorbachev replied that he would not, and moreover, “I will support and defend the leadership of Russia as long as it conducts democratic transformations.” Satisfied, Yeltsin signed over to Gorbachev the deeds of a marble-fronted, three-story building on Leningradsky Prospekt in northwest Moscow. It had once housed the Lenin School, an academic training ground for members of foreign underground movements.
At six o’clock the Soviet president excused himself. He had scheduled a farewell telephone conversation with John Major.
The British prime minister regarded both Gorbachev and Yeltsin as remarkable men, Gorbachev as a communist who believed communism could be reformed, Yeltsin as an anticommunist who believed it had to be destroyed. At a private dinner in London the previous July, Major had found Gorbachev “a charmer with a self-deprecating wit” who had regaled him with anecdotes, including the story of the man in the vodka line who went off to shoot the general secretary in the Kremlin. Major concluded, however, that Gorbachev was simply unable to grasp the basic essentials of the free market and the merits of competition and that his understanding of privatization was negligible. Nevertheless, the prime minister was sad to see him leave the political stage and was calling to wish him well.
Gorbachev’s translator was summoned from his office to interpret the conversation. Palazchenko found the security post in the corridor approaching Gorbachev’s office manned by an unusually large number of people, who included Yeltsin’s bodyguards. One of them asked for his ID before letting him pass. That hadn’t happened before.
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