Moscow, December 25, 1991

by Conor O'Clery

Unable to use the ransacked presidential office on the third floor, Gorbachev descends to the second floor and proceeds to the office of the head of his apparatus, Grigory Revenko, to keep his appointment with the Japanese journalists.

  He tells them, “You know what, I consider I have fulfilled my task.” He points out that the totalitarian system is no more and society has been transformed. “The main thing is that the people have changed. Now that they have tasted freedom I hope nothing will force them back to the status of before.”[301]

  Another Japanese media company makes contact with his staff to offer $1 million for a televised interview in the Kremlin the next day.[302] Gorbachev at first says he will accept but is talked out of it by Chernyaev, who points out that it is shameful to come back to the Kremlin where Yeltsin is having fun, and it would be more shameful to be looking for somewhere else to do the interview. Revenko scolds Chernyaev for turning down such an offer, but Gorbachev tells Chernyaev he has the flu and is not really feeling up to it. There will be many more lucrative media opportunities in the future.

  Gorbachev leaves the Senate Building at midday, ducks into his borrowed Zil, and departs from the Kremlin through the Borovitsky Gate, never to return so long as Boris Yeltsin is president of Russia.

  Early in the afternoon Yeltsin comes back to the Senate Building to occupy what is now his office, this time accompanied by a Russian camera crew. He instructs them to film his first act as master of the Kremlin. This is the signing of a decree providing for Russian jurisdiction over the Soviet Union State Television and Radio Company, Gosteleradio. Sitting at the desk vacated by Gorbachev, the Russian president puts his signature to an order transforming Soviet television into the Ostankino Russian State Television and Radio Company. He also decrees that Yegor Yakovlev should supervise the changeover and remain at its head, prompting a tongue-in-cheek headline in Izvestia: “Yegor Yakovlev Is Ordered to Turn Over All-Union Television and Radio Company to Yegor Yakovlev.”[303]

  The state broadcasting station that smeared him when he led the opposition to Gorbachev, and that tried to gag him nine months ago, is at last fully under Yeltsin’s control. Yakovlev announces an increased output of news, with a new current affairs program called Itogi (Wrap-up) to be hosted by popular broadcaster Yevgeny Kiselyov. As his administration still controls the second national channel, the Russian president commands both TV channels beamed out to the Russian public—though he mandates Ostankino to shed its dependency on the state within a year and become independent through the issue of shares.

  Yeltsin starts his reign as absolute leader in a flurry of activity. After dealing with the future of television he issues an order stripping his rebellious vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, of control over five state committees he had been chairing. He signs a decree for the privatization in the coming weeks of stores, restaurants, workshops, vodka distilleries, pharmaceutical plants, and baby food factories. Banks, railways, and airlines will come later. Collective farms must transfer land to their members and end the state monopoly on 637 million acres of territory. The decree repeals a 1918 Bolshevik ruling that all private ownership of land, mines, waters, forests, and natural resources “is abolished forever.”

  While the increasingly conservative Russian parliament cannot do anything to stop Yeltsin issuing decrees, it can thwart the new ruler in other ways. That afternoon it turns down an application from prosecutor Valentin Stepankov for the arrest of General Vladislav Achalov, the deputy minister of defense at the time of the August coup, on a charge that he was actively involved. Among many deputies, outrage against the coup plotters is giving way to sympathy for their motives. Thirteen conspirators arrested in August remain in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison awaiting trial, but their conditions have been improved.

  Coincidentally, on this day Valery Boldin is released from jail because of deteriorating health. In his four months in captivity for his part in the coup, Gorbachev’s fifty-six-year-old ex-chief of staff has lost none of his contempt for his former master. He is adamant that the junta sought nothing but prosperity and peace for the country, with no desire for power, and that the coup failed because they were too scrupulous and decent to use harsh methods. To Boldin its defeat was not a victory for the United States, as many are saying, but a rout of the disorganized units of a great power by its internal opponents.

  Meanwhile, some one hundred presidents of large American companies arrive in Moscow for a Kremlin meeting on stimulating trade. They were invited by the Soviet government which no longer exists. The meeting goes ahead, with Yeltsin’s people, two days later, to the relief of the somewhat bewildered executives.

  With the end of the Soviet Union, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago move the hands of the Doomsday Clock back to seventeen minutes before midnight. Six years before, when Gorbachev took office, the big hand stood at three minutes to Armageddon. (In January 2010, with new tensions among the world’s nuclear nations and in light of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the hands are moved forward again to six minutes to midnight.)

  Freed from presidential responsibilities, Mikhail Gorbachev helps Raisa in the evening to put their new homes in order. “We were forced to move to different lodgings within twenty-four hours,” complained Gorbachev bitterly.[304] Yeltsin’s security men left all their personal belongings strewn around. These have to be gathered up and packed. For both of them it is a humiliating intrusion on their domestic privacy. Raisa is intensely private and has always been determined to keep personal affairs away from the prying eyes of strangers. One day not long after returning from Foros, Gorbachev came home to find her in tears. She was destroying a bundle of fifty-two letters that the young Gorbachev had written to her when on business trips and that she had kept carefully all her life. She was terrified of another coup and couldn’t bear someone reading them. “She said, ‘We can’t have other people poking their noses into our life,’ and she threw the letters into the fire,” related Gorbachev years later. “She was crying and throwing them in the fire…. I burned twenty-five of my notebooks. Not my personal diaries but my working notes, with all the nuances, characteristics and plans. I burned them thinking I was somehow helping her by doing this.”[305]

  The Gorbachevs and their daughter, Irina, sort through all kinds of papers that have accumulated over the years—notes, letters, telegrams, photographs, and documents. They insist on packing everything themselves, rather than asking for help. Chernyaev is outraged that not only do Yeltsin’s people evict the Gorbachevs so soon, but “for a long time they refused to send a lorry to take away their things.”[306]

  There are hundreds of books to be stored in cardboard boxes: volumes on Russian history by Solovyev, Kluchevsky, and Karamzin; a ten-volume edition of Pushkin’s works; books of verse by Lermontov, the Romantic poet of the Caucasus, and by Mayakovsky, the lyricist of the Bolshevik Revolution; rows of the leather-bound writings of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin; individual favorites like a wellthumbed copy of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, which Gorbachev maintains helped turn him into an opponent of the totalitarian system; a memoir by Sakharov that Gorbachev bought abroad; an antique copy of Vanity Fair by Thackeray presented to Raisa by Margaret Thatcher; and a beautifully bound volume of The Kobza-Player by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, whose lines Raisa likes to quote: “My thoughts, my thoughts, what pain you bring! / Why do you rise up at me in such gloomy rows?”

  As her own librarian and filing clerk, Raisa takes care to arrange the books properly and not get them mixed up. On their bookshelves there was always a note saying, “Friends—please arrange these alphabetically.”[307]

  Raisa also has a large collection of photographs to pack. Among them is one of a deferential party apparatchik handing her a bunch of carnations with an elegant and polite bow. It is Boris Yeltsin. The year was 1985.

  Chapter 29

  THE INTEGRITY OF THE QUARREL

  On New Year’s Eve fewer than 3,000 people turn up in Red Square to lay
to rest the corpse of the Soviet Union and welcome the first year of capitalist, independent Russia.

  In the crowd there are a considerable number of U.S. citizens, some of them evangelists carrying religious symbols. A line of militiamen stand between a few communists gathered near Lenin’s Mausoleum and a group of jeering Americans.

  The midnight chimes ring out from the clock on the Savior Tower, prompting the greatcoated sentinels to goose-step off, jerking their elbows high in the air as always. Fireworks burst in the skies above Red Square, and the small crowd applauds. No members of the government are present to mark the occasion, no church leaders, no dignitaries to say good-bye to seven decades of Bolshevik rule. It is mostly foreigners who are cheering. Even the fireworks are not Russian. They are set off by a German television company to make the occasion a bit more festive for the cameras.[308]

  In a New Year’s message Yeltsin tells the people of Russia that they have inherited a devastated land, but not to despair. “Life is now hard for all of us,” he says. “Our citizens are at times overwhelmed by a sense of bitterness toward their country. But it is unfair to speak about Russia only in gloomy, deprecatory tones. It is not Russia that has suffered a defeat, but the communist idea, the experiment to which Russia has been subjected.”

  It would be more palatable, thinks Chernyaev, if he at least mentions the man to whom he is obliged for being able to speak freely.

  Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev see in the New Year at the two-story mansion in the village of Usovo outside Moscow, to which they moved the day after he resigned. Arriving through the gate and seeing the green-roofed house with mustard-colored walls and a weather vane marking the year it was built, 1956, they must feel a sense of déjà vu. This is the same state dacha, Moskva-reka-5, set in a fine wooded estate of one hundred acres, where the Gorbachevs lived for six years, from the time Mikhail Sergeyevich was made candidate member of the Politburo in 1979 until he became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985. When he moved to what is now the presidential mansion later that year, he assigned Moskva-reka-5 to the newly promoted Boris Yeltsin, who was overwhelmed at its palatial rooms and “kitchen big enough to feed an army.”

  At first Gorbachev does not go anywhere and hardly meets anyone. “Desperation and hopelessness never overcame me,” he recalls, while admitting that the first few days were very emotional for himself and his family. A former speech writer, the philosopher Alexander Tsipko suggests that Gorbachev retire to his mother’s village in Stavropol and write books. Others recommend that he should become more reserved and transcendental.

  President Yeltsin and his family move into Barvikha-4 within hours of the Gorbachevs’ departure. Naina sets about giving it a postrevolution atmosphere by hanging religious icons on the walls, along with the Glazunov portrait of Yeltsin’s mother. Yeltsin likes the presidential dacha so much he takes to staying there on weeknights rather than at the apartment. He delights in its sports hall, tennis courts, children’s playground, dog pound, gardens with ponds and ornamental bridges, and the fenced-off section of the river where he can bathe and fish.

  Naina tortures Alexander Korzhakov with complaints that Raisa has taken all the good furniture and replaced it with old stuff, even though the contents manager, housekeeper, and estate manager all confirm that nothing has been removed.

  The Russian president also aspires to Gorbachev’s former city apartment on Lenin Hills. Korzhakov drives Boris and Naina Yeltsin there to inspect the sixroom living space from which the Gorbachevs were so rudely evicted on December 25. The flat-roofed apartment block was built to Gorbachev’s instructions in 1985 and betrays his singular lack of architectural taste.[309] Valery Boldin compared the “grim, dirty-grey concrete structure” to a prefabricated school. The location, nevertheless, is prime. It is set back on a wide boulevard, named after former Soviet prime minister Alexey Kosygin, that skirts the top of a curving wooded embankment high above a U-shaped bend in the Moscow River. The fourthfloor penthouse the Gorbachevs occupied offers a wide panorama of Moscow city, with Novodevichy Convent in the foreground and the Kremlin spires in the distance. At 2,700 square feet, the living space is big even by the standards of the Soviet elite. Korzhakov professes himself shocked by the splendor of the interior. He notes how “the refinement and riches of the quarters of a French queen would pale in comparison with Raisa Maximovna’s boudoir [and] bathroom with Jacuzzi in precious stones, onyx and yashma.” Naina particularly loves the bedroom furniture of fine-grained Karelian birch. She is ready to move in on the spot, but Yeltsin feels it is too much like a museum and that everything is very stiff and formal.

  There is something else to consider as well. The Gorbachevs have been moved to a three-room apartment in the same building. The Yeltsins would be living under the same roof with them. Unwilling to risk any contact with their despised adversary, the new first family decides not to occupy the apartment. But they take the luxury furniture and the German kitchen units despite the fact that they were built in and difficult to move.

  Yeltsin keeps his old apartment at 54 Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street in downtown Moscow for another three years before he moves his city residence to a new block in Osennyaya Street in the western suburbs. He assigns apartments there to his closest associates, including Yegor Gaidar and Alexander Korzhakov, though these privileged tenants spend most of their time in their own country dachas. They have a collective house warming in 1994 with music supplied by the presidential orchestra. With the foreign currency royalties from his memoirs, Yeltsin later also builds his own three-story dacha in the settlement of Gorki in woods nine miles west of Moscow.

  There are other wonderful spoils of office. Yeltsin takes over Gorbachev’s presidential Ilyushin-62 salon-version jet airliner, which he adorns with the word Rossiya (Russia) and the Russian tricolor. Later he trades up to a wide-bodied Ilyushin-96, equipped with an enormous double bed. He also acquires an armorplated BMW imported from Germany. Where he once denounced the perks of the communist leadership, he demands all the trappings of a member of the club of world leaders to which Gorbachev belonged, insisting that his struggle was not against the privileges of the party; “it was against the party’s unbridled, allenveloping power.” His logic is simple: Under communism no one outside the party leadership could aspire to a Zil. In a market economy anyone with the money can drive whatever limousine they can afford, and there is no shame in that.

  Yeltsin is also anxious to show off his possession of the nuclear suitcase. He is immensely proud of his nuclear responsibilities. He desires that the colonel-guardians should stand out rather than look inconspicuous as in Gorbachev’s entourage and has a uniform especially designed for them. Everywhere he goes he is accompanied by two officers in black submarine blazers with shoulder boards and gold braid and buttons.

  Though the power struggle between Russia and the USSR is over, and Gorbachev and Yeltsin will never cross paths again in person, the integrity of their quarrel is undiminished by their new roles in Russian life. Linked forever by history, they are consumed with bitterness over real and imagined slights. Yeltsin ensures that the former Soviet leader becomes persona non grata in Moscow’s official circles. While he is not condemned to the status of nonperson like Khrushchev, Gorbachev nevertheless feels that the press and television under Yeltsin’s “baleful influence” is encouraged to write negative stories about him. While the Gorbachevs are on a two-week vacation in Stavropol after his resignation, Rabochaya Tribuna (Workers’ Tribune) publishes a claim from the Russian procurator that Gorbachev authorized the KGB to spy on Yeltsin during their power struggle and that the discovery of documents proving this in Valery Boldin’s safe explained Yeltsin’s “dubious treatment” in hustling Gorbachev out of the Kremlin.

  On returning to Moscow from Stavropol, Gorbachev begins a campaign to reestablish his reputation as a figure of consequence in the world. Anatoly Chernyaev, Georgy Shakhnazarov, and Alexander Yakovlev join him as members of his founda
tion staff. Palazchenko stays on as his English-language interpreter. Besides establishing his foundation, Gorbachev founds Green Cross, an international organization committed to expediting solutions to environmental problems that transcend national boundaries. One of their first visitors is his old American ally Jim Garrison. “Why didn’t you guys fight back? Why didn’t you have Yeltsin arrested?” Garrison asks Yakovlev. “Jim, let me tell you something about power,” replies Yakovlev. “All my life I have dealt with power, real power, Politburo power. You have it for a time, and then, like sand, you let it slip through your fingers. You leave, and life goes on.”[310]

  Yeltsin monitors the perestroika veterans in his camp for suspicions of divided loyalty. When the head of television, Yegor Yakovlev, tells Yeltsin out of courtesy that he has dined with the Gorbachevs at their dacha, the Russian president replies, according to Yakovlev, “Do you think I don’t know about that!” Then almost plaintively Yeltsin asks, “Why did he invite you to this dinner but not me?” “Are you crazy?” replies Yakovlev. “You are president; he is nothing.” Yeltsin protests, “He never calls me; he never rings me; he never phones.”[311]

  This bizarre exchange leads the television chief to conclude that there exists a “savage hatred” of Gorbachev buried deep in Yeltsin’s soul. Yeltsin fires Yakovlev ten months later, after the broadcast of a documentary about ethnic conflict in the Caucasus, which annoys him.

  The rivals rushed to bring out self-serving biographies: Mikhail Gorbachev—Memoirs and Boris Yeltsin’s Zapiski Prezidenta (Notes of the President), published in English as The Struggle for Russia. Yeltsin gets a $450,000 advance on royalties compared to Gorbachev’s $800,000.

  Three weeks after Gorbachev resigns, James Baker travels around the former Soviet Union on an inspection tour.[312] His staff carry thousands of dollars in cash to pay for fuel at each airport. His excursion coincides with a short-lived Berlin Airlift—type operation during which, in the space of a week, fifty-four sorties of C-5, C-141, and C-130 transport planes carry a total of thirty-eight million pounds of food and medicine to the newly independent states of the CIS. The State Department ensures that a mercy flight arrives at each airport at the same time as the secretary of state.