Moscow, December 25, 1991

by Conor O'Clery

  In the postcommunist chaos few escape the rapacious demands of the ascendant Russian mafiya. A financial report prepared for Yeltsin in his first year finds that four out of five of the banks and large private enterprises in Russian cities are paying more than 10 percent of their revenues to organized crime. Even smalltime street hawkers are victims. “For some time in 1992 we hang out at Arbat selling stuff,” recalls Olga Perova. “Local gangsters protect us so that we won’t get robbed, and we pay them kickbacks.”[321] Contract killings became common. In 1993, 123 bank employees are gunned down or blown up. Privatization of state apartments results in a particularly ugly type of crime: Pensioners are persuaded to sell their living space and stay on rent free, and then are pushed under a bus.

  To Gorbachev all this is confirmation that he was correct to oppose Yeltsin in breaking up the old order so brutally. He complains that the bloody shoot-outs in Moscow are worse than those in Chicago during the prohibition era and that the outflow of billions of dollars deposited in foreign banks to await the arrival of their gangster owners is made possible with the connivance, or inertia, of Yeltsin’s government. “Having beaten his way to power,” Gorbachev jibes in his 1995 memoir, “Yeltsin instantly forgot his wrathful speeches against abuses and allowed his associates to indulge in corruption and privileges such as the communist nomenklatura had never dreamed of.”

  As living standards plummet, deputies in the Russian Supreme Soviet seethe with discontent. The shock therapy is increasingly seen as a Western imposition. Much anger is directed at the American and European experts who commute to Moscow to peddle their advice to the new government. The speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov, attacks the “vile” monetarist policy imposed by the Americans. The demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky courts populist support by calling the United States “an empire of evil, the nucleus of hell” that conspires to rule the world.

  Yeltsin resists the domestic clamor to restore subsidies and fix prices, but in December 1992 he is obliged to dismiss Gaidar from his government and replace him with Viktor Chernomyrdin, a politician more sympathetic to the plight of state industry, though Chernomyrdin soon finds that Gaidar’s reforms have gone too far for the reintroduction of price controls on food items. In a few months Gaidar has managed to smash the state planning system and establish a market economy in a country where civil society hardly existed and initiative had been crushed for the best part of a century.

  The volatile Russian president becomes so depressed at the setbacks that he contemplates suicide. On December 9, 1992, he locks himself inside the overheated bathhouse at Barvikha-4 and is only saved from suffocation by Korzhakov, who breaks down the door and pulls him out. On another occasion in his Kremlin office, he produces a pistol given him by his security minister, Viktor Barannikov—before Yeltsin sacked him for corruption—and threatens to shoot himself. Aides persuade him not to be foolish. He doesn’t pull the trigger. The weapon, however, is not lethal: Korzhakov has taken the precaution of boiling the bullets in water to make them harmless.[322]

  In the Supreme Soviet the Russian president’s enemies proliferate, and the communists make up lost ground. Nevertheless, a motion to impeach Yeltsin fails by a narrow margin. “This means that the Russian people do not after all want to go back to the bright communist future,” observes Gaidar. But the parliament continues to pass antireform measures and mobilize against Yeltsin. It decks itself out in red flags and anarchist and fascist banners and stockpiles arms. It elects Rutskoy as provisional Russian president, and he names a new government. Russia once again faces a showdown between the White House and the Kremlin. The crisis comes to a head on September 21, 1993, when Yeltsin issues a decree dissolving the parliament. Armed White House “defenders,” many of them neo-Stalinists and protofascists, begin roaming the streets to show their defiance of the order, some in Cossack high hats and belts. In the following days they attack the television station and other key buildings in the city. On October 4 pro-Yeltsin army units fire several shells into the upper floors of the barricaded White House, forcing the communists and nationalists to surrender. The brief civil war results in the deaths of more than 150 people. The outcome is a more authoritarian style of presidential government.

  Gorbachev blames Yeltsin for the crisis and calls the storming of the White House an act of madness. “The army was ordered to shoot at the people! It was unforgivable!” He charges Yeltsin with laying the groundwork for an absolute monarchy under the guise of a presidential republic.

  The Russian constitution is changed in a referendum on December 12, 1993, giving stronger powers to the president. A new and weaker parliament, the Duma, is elected. One of its first acts is to grant an amnesty to the leaders of the White House revolt of October 1993, which Yeltsin endorses for the sake of peace.

  The plotters of the August 1991 coup are released from prison without charges, but General Valentin Varennikov insists on standing trial. The case is heard in Moscow in 1994. Gorbachev is called as a witness and gives vent to his feelings about amnesties for coup plotters. “If we react to such crimes as nothing more than a farce, we would have one coup after another,” he declares. “We have already lived through the conspiracy of Belovezh Forest, which finished off the USSR by exploiting the consequences of the August coup. Then we had to live through the bloody events of 3–4 October 1993, when before our very eyes parliament was fired on…. If our future is to be determined by new coup plotters, we will never become a country in which everyone can feel a citizen.”

  Varennikov walks free after all charges are dropped and claims that his acquittal is proof of Mikhail Gorbachev’s guilt. In 2008, a year before he dies, the former general presents the case in favor of Stalin in a popular nationwide television project seeking to identify Russia’s greatest historical figures. Stalin wins third place behind Grand Prince Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod and prerevolutionary prime minister Pyotr Stolypin. Neither Yeltsin nor Gorbachev figure in the final twelve.

  In December 1994 President Yeltsin, whose outrage at the bloodshed in the Baltics in 1991 helped change Russian history, authorizes a full-scale and brutal invasion of the Russian republic of Chechnya to end its independence from Moscow. Russian forces fight an incompetent and savage war with Chechen guerrillas that destroys the capital of Grozny and results in the deaths of between 30,000 and 100,000 civilians. General Grachev, who ordered the storming of Grozny, reputedly when dead drunk, is sacked by Yeltsin when Russia is defeated, and a peace treaty is concluded in August 1996.

  Yeltsin runs for reelection as president of Russia in 1996, amid widespread expectations that he will lose because of a collapse in his popularity and his poor health. He almost puts the election off because of a vote in the Duma on March 15, 1996, to renounce the decision of the Russian Supreme Soviet of December 12, 1991, approving the Belovezh Agreement—which raises questions about the legitimacy of the new Russia. His daughter Tanya helps talk him out of shutting down the Duma and delaying the election for two years, which could provoke a civil war.

  His main opponent is Gennady Zyuganov, the candidate of the Russian Communist Party. Zyuganov campaigns to revive the socialist motherland, lumping Yeltsin and Gorbachev together with a world oligarchy as the destroyers of Russia. Convinced that “the country needs Gorbachev,” the former Soviet leader ignores the sage advice of his loyalists and runs as head of the fledgling Social Democratic Party.

  The sixty-five-year-old Yeltsin stops drinking, loses weight, and manages to summon up one more great burst of energy to campaign for reelection. American and European leaders troop to Moscow to boost their free-market champion. Yeltsin’s campaign is helped by financial donations from the oligarchs, a timely announcement of a $10 billion loan from the IMF, the anticommunist bias of the television networks, and television advertisements produced with the expert advice of the American PR firm of Ogilvy & Mather. The Russian president wins reelection by 54 percent to Zyuganov’s 40 percent.

  Gorbachev is humiliated by his performance
in the election. With one section of the population accusing him of betraying socialism in the name of reform, and the other of sabotaging reforms to defend socialism, Gorbachev receives a mere half of 1 percent of the vote. In a further snub, Yeltsin removes his name from the guest list for his inauguration.

  In his second term, Yeltsin’s Kremlin court becomes a hive of intrigue. It is a period of political and economic chaos during which Russia’s natural resources are being sold off to favored insiders at fire-sale prices. Yeltsin grows ever more irascible, yields power arbitrarily, and treats his staff abominably. Aides assume that as head of his security, Alexander Korzhakov is monitoring their phone calls, and they communicate with each other only in scribbled notes. Always suspicious of overfamiliarity, Yeltsin drops his preindependence collaborators one by one. He lets Gennady Burbulis go because his grey cardinal is annoyingly appearing every day “in my office, at meetings and receptions, at the dacha, in the steam bath.” Korzhakov survives for five years but is fired after a scandal over election funding. He writes an unflattering book, Boris Yeltsins: From Dawn to Dusk, which angers Yeltsin so much they never speak again.

  Yeltsin’s first, and only, formal contact with Gorbachev after December 1991 comes seven years later. In 1999 he sends a telegram of sympathy to the sixty-eight-year-old ex-president as Raisa Gorbacheva lies dying of leukemia in University Hospital in Münster, Germany. “I want to express my deep concern for the ordeal that your family is going through,” he writes. “I know well how hard it is to experience the illness of a loved one. More than ever, in moments like these, mutual support, warmth and caring are needed. I wish for you, my esteemed Mikhail Sergeyevich, strength and perseverance, and, for Raisa Maximovna, courage in her struggle against the disease as well as a speedy recovery.”

  Gorbachev shows the telegram to his old friend the Italian journalist Giulietto Chiesa as they stroll in a park near the hospital in Münster. “These are kind words, a very nice gesture,” he remarks.[323]

  The illness of Raisa touches a chord in Russia, especially as she is struck down by a disease with which her charitable work is associated. When Gorbachev asks his staff to approach the new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, for help in getting a passport for Raisa’s sister, Lyudmila, so that she can be available in Germany to become a bone marrow donor for Raisa, Putin’s response is instantaneous.

  Gorbachev tears up talking with Chiesa about these acts of kindness. He thought it would take a whole generation before they understood, he says, taking a crumpled cutting from Izvestia out of his pocket and handing it to the Italian. Under the heading “Lady of Dignity” it reads: “Maybe we Russians are becoming people again…. It may only be on this sad occasion, but we are showing great respect for two people who love each other, Raisa and Mikhail. Diminutive and elegant, with sophisticated tastes, Raisa is not like the others. She has been the symbol of a country that wanted to free itself from its dreary grayness. People didn’t understand her, or perhaps they didn’t want to understand her. Maybe too much was asked of them when the couple was in power. But it’s also true that no one was able to bend their will and subdue them.” Raisa cried when she read the article, says Gorbachev.

  The transplant cannot be made, and Raisa dies four weeks later, on September 20, 1999, at age sixty-seven. She is buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Yeltsin does not go to the funeral but issues a statement commemorating “a wonderful person, a beautiful woman, a loving wife and mother who is no longer with us.”

  Vladimir Polyakov, the ex-president’s press secretary, believes the sympathy for the Gorbachevs has a political as well as a humanitarian side. “People need a certain amount of time to evaluate the past. He [Gorbachev] entered our lives so unexpectedly, and when he left, almost as suddenly, people needed a scapegoat. But if it had not been for Gorbachev, Yeltsin would still be sitting in Sverdlovsk as the regional Communist Party secretary. And if Yeltsin had been elected general secretary of the party in 1985 instead of Gorbachev, no changes would have happened in Russia. Now people are asking for forgiveness for not understanding that before.”[324]

  In November 1996 Yeltsin collapses and has a quintuple heart bypass operation. He is never the same afterwards. On December 31, 1999, he announces that he is leaving the remainder of his presidency in the hands of Vladimir Putin, who has risen from mayor’s aide in St. Petersburg to a senior position on Yeltsin’s staff, then head of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, and finally prime minister, in which role he has promoted a second war against Chechnya. For the first time in history, a Russian leader steps down voluntarily. Yeltsin tells Russians, “I want to beg forgiveness for your dreams that never came true. And also I would like to beg forgiveness not to have justified your hopes.”

  His departure from the Kremlin is as low key as Gorbachev’s eight years previously. Yeltsin returns to his office after a farewell lunch at 1 p.m. and presents Putin with the squat fountain pen with which he signed decrees. “Take care of Russia,” he says and leaves the Senate Building for good.[325] Both Yeltsin and Gorbachev are invited to attend Putin’s inauguration as acting president but avoid each other.

  On the tenth anniversary of his abdication, Gorbachev’s contempt for the republic leaders who conspired with Yeltsin to break up the Soviet Union remains undiminished. “I was shocked by the treacherous behavior of those people, who cut the country in pieces in order to settle accounts and establish themselves as tsars,” he tells reporters in Moscow on December 25, 2001. He could not oppose them at the time, he says, because that might have led to civil war in a nation brimming with nuclear weapons. “And what is Russia without the Soviet Union? I don’t know. A stump of some sort.”

  Asked if he is happy, Gorbachev admits to not knowing what happiness is but remarks that fate allowed him to lead a process of renewal that involved the whole world. “God! What other happiness could there be!”

  The former Soviet president meanwhile is embarking on a lucrative new profession as a model for advertising agencies. In December 1997 he appears in an advertisement for Pizza Hut, for which he is paid $150,000. It includes a scene at a café table in which customers argue whether Gorbachev brought freedom or chaos to Russia and concludes with an old woman saying that because of him the pizza topping goes all the way to the edge of the crust, at which all cry out, “Hail, Gorbachev!”[326] Gorbachev cites the need for funds for his foundation as the reason for subjecting himself to this indignity. In 2005 he makes a cameo appearance in the video game series Street Fighter II. In 2007, the man who once possessed the nuclear suitcase allows himself to be used by French fashion house Louis Vuitton to sell their vanity cases around the world. This advertisement, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, shows a pensive Gorbachev in the back of a limousine, a Louis Vuitton bag on the seat beside him, being driven past the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall. The publication poking out of the bag has a barely readable headline in Russian: “The Murder of Litvinenko: They Wanted to Give Up the Suspect for $7,000,” a reference to the poisoning by radioactive isotope of Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko in London the previous year. On his deathbed Litvinenko blamed agents of Putin’s Kremlin. The company’s ad agency Ogilvy & Mather denies trying to convey any subliminal message. The magazine AdWeek describes the Louis Vuitton image as one of the most successful commercial photographs of the decade.

  In 2006, the year when both Gorbachev and Yeltsin celebrate their seventyfifth birthdays, they still have not mellowed towards each other. Yeltsin accuses Gorbachev, for the first time openly, of having advance knowledge of the August coup and waiting it out to see who would win. “Yeltsin is a liar; it’s sheer nonsense,” responds Gorbachev.

  Boris Yeltsin dies of congestive heart failure on April 23, 2007, at age seventysix. He is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery. Putin, then in the second of two four-year terms as president, declares the day of his funeral a national day of mourning. Mikhail Gorbachev goes to the burial and offers faint praise, extending his condolences “to
the family of a man on whose shoulders rested many great deeds for the good of the country and serious mistakes—a tragic fate.” Andrey Kolesnikov, writing in Kommersant, describes seeing Gorbachev downcast and suddenly looking much older. “It was evident that he was suffering in ways that few in the hall were; together with the life of Boris Yeltsin, a piece of his own life had been torn away.”

  Two years later, at age seventy-eight, Mikhail Gorbachev announces that he is returning to politics with the creation of a new political party, the Independent Democratic Party of Russia, which he cofounds with billionaire Alexander Lebedev, part owner of the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta (New Gazette) and proprietor of three UK newspapers. The party is to be “social-democratic” and advance an “anticrisis initiative” developed by economists at the Gorbachev Foundation.

  Gorbachev’s ardor for the United States cools further over the years. In 2009, as the United States and Europe struggle with economic crises, he chides Americans “who indulged in the euphoria of victory in the Cold War” for thinking that the West’s system did not need any changes. “So if you insist on me giving advice… I do believe that what America needs is its own perestroika.”[327]