Mikhail Gorbachev was fifty-four when he became Soviet leader. There might have been other contenders, hawks from the Party old guard such as the foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, or Moscow’s Party boss, Viktor Grishin, but Gorbachev was the only candidate that the Politburo considered with any seriousness on the night of Konstantin Chernenko’s death. The consensus had shifted towards change. ‘There was a thinly veiled happiness in the eyes of the assembled,’ wrote Gorbachev’s future aide, Anatoly Chernyaev, describing the Central Committee plenum that gathered to add its rubber stamp to the decision. ‘The uncertainty is over, now it’s time for Russia to have a real leader.’96 Radio stations across the empire were dutifully playing Chopin’s funeral march, but the mood in the Kremlin was optimistic, even celebratory.
This upwelling of hope was the hallmark of Gorbachev’s first months in power. Though he remained a Party man, vowing to ‘perfect a society of developed socialism’, the new leader was keen to sweep away the barriers to creativity.97 His initial reform programme amounted to a necessary, but very dangerous, assault on complacency and graft. He even tackled the Kremlin ‘feeding trough’. Incongruous though it appeared, a man already noted for his foreign suits and slender, elegantly dressed wife set out to challenge privilege. ‘We need to start with ourselves,’ he told the Politburo in April 1986. ‘Banquets, presents, receptions – we’ve been encouraging and taking part in all of this. Bosses at all levels have their own food supply centres, their wives never have to go shopping … This is all our own fault.’98 Stories about Raisa Gorbachev’s consumer habits ran counter to this, with rumours that she shopped at Cartier and Pierre Cardin. ‘What the gullible Western public did not know,’ a loyal witness, one of the Kremlin’s own interpreters, wrote later, ‘was that most of these stories were either planted or grossly exaggerated by the KGB.’99
Whatever the truth of that, it was already clear that every carefully considered step Gorbachev took was matched and stymied by determined opposition. Some of the problems were the results of years of mismanagement. Soon after that crusading 1986 Politburo speech, for instance, came the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl, a disaster that seemed to bring every failing of Soviet infrastructure and government into focus. But any fundamental reform was bound to upset vested interests, while the policy of glasnost, or openness, that Gorbachev encouraged in the wake of the nuclear accident threatened to start a witch-hunt against managers. The army and secret police were on alert at once, as were the heads of any institution whose survival depended on the status quo. The traditional working class, meanwhile, attacked their leader’s policy of restructuring, or perestroika, for putting their wages and historic sense of class-based privilege at risk. And then there were the radical reformers, at the other extreme, who were always urging Gorbachev to do far more. In retrospect, his premiership survived for longer than the circumstances warranted. As Andrei Grachev, the Party leader’s aide, would later write, ‘People seldom ask how many coups d’état Gorbachev managed to avoid in six and a half years of reform.’100
But the Kremlin’s affable new leader delighted the wider world. Whatever people thought of him at home, the level of approval he sustained elsewhere, as Chernyaev recollected, ‘was like getting an honorary degree from the international community’, and it earned him a Nobel Peace Prize.101 Gorbachev’s early priorities included an arms limitation treaty, negotiated in Washington, and the ending of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan. Even more spectacular was his encouragement of democratic change in Eastern Europe, a process that began with demonstrations on the streets and culminated in the fall of every jaded Communist regime. These triumphs were unprecedented, but it was the leader’s style as much as what he promised that caught public attention. On walkabouts and public photo-calls, in Berlin, London and New York, the general secretary attracted large, adoring crowds, and journalists began to write of Gorbymania and even Gorbasm.102 His staunch supporter Margaret Thatcher flirted with him, Ronald Reagan traded jokes with him (and also, on one occasion, his fountain pen), and even the older George Bush fell under the spell of the last and most tragic Soviet Communist leader.103
His was the stardom of the cheering streets, of summit meetings, foreign travel, television interviews. But though he was a man who liked to get about (itself refreshing after years of gerontocracy), Gorbachev also imbued the Kremlin with a fresh spirit of openness, even making occasional forays into its tourist areas to the amazement of the milling crowds.104 The old place, with its Cold War connotations, was a fine set for a photo-op. Gorbachev’s staff created a kind of studio there, complete with Soviet flag and rows of dummy telephones, where the leader could talk to cameramen across a gleaming desk.105 More formally, in the staterooms of the Grand Palace, a sprightly, smiling team received official visits from Thatcher and Reagan, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand.106 But all of it, from sham office to mirror-lined gallery, was theatre. As a Party man, Gorbachev preferred to work in Old Square. His main office remained there, and, as a politician, it was always his real home.107
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Although it ultimately brought about his fall, almost everyone agrees that glasnost was Gorbachev’s greatest achievement. Dmitry Volkogonov called it ‘a unique example of the truth alone achieving what was beyond the power of a mighty state’.108 It was a revolution where ideas acted like missiles. At first, the targets were bureaucrats, corruption, and the euphemisms that concealed decline. But then attention focused on the heroes of the past, the stern-faced men whose sculpted heads topped plinths in every square and meeting hall. Stalin was an easy target: Gorbachev himself described him as ‘a criminal, devoid of any morality’.109 But once the critics turned to Lenin and the Communist Party, the days of Soviet power were numbered. This regime had relied on lies and half-truths since the day of its foundation. History had been squeezed into a tight official frame, purged of disturbing episodes and trimmed to charm the patriotic crowds. But glasnost brought the true past back like an avenging ghost.110 The archive doors were forced open, and for the first time in living memory what mattered in politics was the pressure from people on the streets, debating, questioning, and demanding their rights. In Moscow, the voices were soon pressing for multi-party elections, while in republics such as Georgia and Lithuania there were strident calls for independence. While Gorbachev continued to defend the Party and the Union, the red flag on the Kremlin’s Senate dome stood for a revolution – and a state – that many wanted to cast off.
The next round in the Soviet Union’s final dance was also initiated by Gorbachev. To put some energy into his country’s stagnant civic life, he called for the creation of a new, elected, legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR. The elections took place in March 1989. The outcome was preordained: large quotas of seats were reserved for the Communist Party, the Komsomol (Young Communists) and trade unions, and only one political party (Communist) had been permitted to campaign. But other points of view were represented nonetheless, for coalitions did emerge calling themselves ‘platforms’ or ‘informal groups’. When the 2,250-strong Congress assembled in Khrushchev’s Kremlin Palace in May 1989, its televised debates became a testing-ground for pluralist politics. Beyond the Soviet Union, 1989 was the year of communism’s eclipse in Europe, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November that year became an emblem of possibility and hope. The Congress of People’s Deputies was an unwieldy beast by comparison, far less glamorous than the chanting crowds of East Berliners. In a spell-bound Russia, however, it made an excellent platform for the emerging stars of the democratic age.
One such was Boris Yeltsin, one-time Party boss and now the Russian people’s favourite tribune. He was elected to the Congress in 1989 as a representative from Moscow, just four years after he first came to the capital from the Ural city of Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg). Ironically, it had been Gorbachev who brought this burly man to prominence in 1985, appointing him to a Central Committee portfolio that included heavy industry, transport and
planning as well as architectural affairs.111 The two politicians seemed to work together well, for at this stage Yeltsin’s energy and directness appealed to the reforming general secretary. At the end of 1985, Gorbachev promoted his protégé to the post of Moscow Party boss, replacing the long-serving conservative, Grishin. Yeltsin cultivated a populist reputation in the post, delighting Muscovites by his willingness to travel on their buses and to fight their battles with the bureaucrats. As Gorbachev recalled, ‘I considered our choice for the secretary of the capital’s city committee to be a success.’112
Inside the Kremlin, however, the real politics of perestroika was more discordant. In particular, Yeltsin was impatient with its slow pace, and then there was a clash of personalities. ‘The Politburo was also becoming cult-ridden,’ wrote Chernyaev. ‘Only one member [Gorbachev] talked, while all the others listened.’113 In September 1987, Yeltsin requested Gorbachev to release him from his posts in Moscow and the Politburo. The letter was ignored (Gorbachev was on holiday), but in October came a more open revolt. In the midst of a closed four-hour debate in the Kremlin about plans for the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Yeltsin demanded to know what kind of timetable the leaders intended for more important aspects of reform. His own work had become impossible, he claimed, and he implied that conservatives in the elite were scheming to block him. Instead of responding to its substantive ideas, Gorbachev allowed his colleagues to condemn this outburst as insubordination. The confrontation marked the beginning of Yeltsin’s moral ascendancy.114 He was removed from both of his official posts, but that meant he was free to say just what he liked. His electoral campaign in 1989 was based on a platform of anti-corruption and reform. In July 1990, already a media star, he took an even more decisive step and handed in his Communist Party card. ‘I was probably too liberal … as regards Yeltsin,’ Gorbachev would later claim. ‘I should have sent him as ambassador to Great Britain or maybe a former British colony.’115
But it was now too late for that. Yeltsin was building an independent power-base, tapping into a long-neglected ideological seam of ethnic Russian patriotism. In 1989 and 1990, nationalist demonstrations dominated the news, culminating in unilateral declarations of independence in the Baltic and armed uprisings in the Caucasus. Russians were testing their nationalist credentials as well, ambivalent about the tensions in their empire but keen to find a more coherent identity for themselves. It was in this atmosphere that Gorbachev proposed to amend the constitution, creating a new post, that of President of the USSR, with direct responsibility to the Congress of People’s Deputies. The move was intended to strengthen the Union, to hold the fissile republics together by giving them a single, and distinguished, figurehead. In March 1990, without appealing to the people as a whole, the Congress elected Gorbachev to the post. The Kremlin was spruced up as the new president’s official residence, and while the Politburo continued its weekly meetings on the third floor, the Senate became Gorbachev’s official base. Fifteen months later, as the Soviet Union dissolved around him, the Kremlin was virtually the only territory he controlled.116
The world was in revolution. Spurred by the success of their neighbours in Eastern Europe, Soviet citizens pressed their demands; Lithuania’s campaign for independence was particularly vocal. Even in Moscow, the crowds were taking to the streets, some calling on Gorbachev to ‘Remember Romania!’ and aligning him with the detested Ceauşescus, who had been executed in Bucharest in December 1989.117 This was unfair, for it was Gorbachev who had unleashed the popular tide in Europe in the first place, but the glory of the recent past made his increasingly repressive stance appalling. Deserted by reformers almost everywhere, he had become a prisoner of the Politburo hawks, the men who would destroy it all rather than let a single Soviet republic go its own way. In January 1991, Soviet troops moved into the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. The demonstrations there were suppressed at the cost of fourteen lives. Again thanks to Gorbachev’s earlier reforms, the violence was televised, and images of Soviet tanks loomed once again across Europe. The president – and the Soviet Union – had lost the moral argument for ever.
It was not clear, however, that the bulk of Soviet citizens were ready to give up on their empire. In March 1991, Gorbachev presided over a referendum on the Union’s future. The question on the ballot paper was loaded: ‘Do you consider it necessary to preserve the USSR as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, in which the rights and freedoms of people of all nationalities will be guaranteed in full measure?’118 Few Russians (the Baltic republics were a different case) would readily have answered ‘no’, but all the same, the overwhelming ‘yes’ vote represented a democratic victory of sorts. The states that were to form the proposed federation, however, were changing apace, and nothing doomed Gorbachev’s scheme for the continued Union as decisively as the decision to create a directly elected president for each of the new republics as part of the restructuring.
First mooted in 1989 by the Kazakh leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the move was meant to increase regional autonomy within a reformed Soviet Union.119 ‘Perhaps, from the outside, such a collection of “presidents”, who in fact had no real power, appeared somewhat ridiculous,’ Yeltsin would later muse.120 But the campaign played into his hands. The creation of elected assemblies under Gorbachev had given Yeltsin a new platform, and by 1991 he was already Speaker of the Russian parliament, a body (technically responsible to the plenary Congress of People’s Deputies) that met in a building on the Moscow river called the White House. Yeltsin’s frank, populist speeches there had given him the sort of profile that exasperated voters could recognize and understand. Now he could play for a direct mandate to lead them. ‘Not all the members of Yeltsin’s entourage displayed a peace-loving mood,’ Gorbachev remembered later. ‘They had worked themselves up to fever pitch.’121 On 12 June 1991, when the votes for the Russian presidency were counted, it turned out that Yeltsin had swept the board.
The die-hards of the Soviet world stood no chance against the nationalist juggernaut. But they had never set great store by democratic methods. In the summer of 1991, while the bevy of newly elected presidents, including Yeltsin and the ingratiating Nazarbayev, were meeting with Gorbachev to discuss a new and looser future for the Union, a different set of talks, more secret, was taking place in and around Moscow. The conspiracy included senior Kremlin aides, including Gorbachev’s advisor Valery Boldin, and the heads of the armed forces, the interior ministry and the KGB. George Bush took action as soon as his agents could see a pattern in the scraps of information on their wires. The United States ambassador, Jack Matlock, broke the news to Gorbachev personally: the Americans had intelligence of a conspiracy to remove him, planned for 21 June. According to Chernyaev, Gorbachev laughed. ‘It’s a hundred percent improbable,’ he replied. ‘But I appreciate George telling me about his concern.’122
The plot, in fact, was well advanced. They called themselves the State Committee for the State of Emergency, the GKChP, and like its title their conspiracy was clumsy. On 18 August, when Gorbachev had left for an annual holiday at Foros in the Crimea, a group of senior officials gathered in Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov’s Kremlin office, armed with bottles and glasses and surrounded by a chaos of half-finished plans. Their aim was to reverse the likely fragmentation of the Union and bring back the old disciplines of Brezhnev’s time. One of their first acts was to send a delegation to negotiate with Gorbachev. Later that night, when they learned of his refusal to co-operate, some clearly wished that they had never joined the plot, but by then it was too late and the only panacea was drink. There was no going back, but the way forward called for actions more decisive than these men had ever bargained for. The Kremlin once again witnessed conspiracy, but this time it took place in an atmosphere of regret, recrimination and warm government brandy.
The two main targets of the plotters were the presidents, Gorbachev (USSR) and Yeltsin (Russia). Gorbachev was placed under KGB house-arrest in the government ma
nsion at Foros. At the same time, special troops from the crack ‘Alpha’ military division gathered in the woods round Yeltsin’s dacha in the Moscow suburb of Arkhangel’skoe with orders for his imminent arrest. On 19 August, Muscovites woke to the sinister rumble of tanks and armoured personnel carriers. ‘The coup leaders decided to shock the city with an enormous display of military hardware and personnel,’ Yeltsin recalled.
I look at the tragedy of the coup plotters as the tragedy of a whole platoon of government bureaucrats whom the system had turned into cogs and stripped of any human traits … But it would have been far worse if that platoon of cold and robotlike Soviet bureaucrats had returned to the leadership of the country.’123
There were courageous moments everywhere. In Moscow itself, the crowds who confronted the plotters’ tanks were gambling with their very lives. In Foros, Gorbachev, too, held out for days. When the coup leaders claimed in public that the president was ill, his entourage feared for his safety: the strain certainly told on Raisa, who later suffered a brain haemorrhage. But it was Yeltsin, breaking through the armed cordon around his home and driving straight to the Russian parliament building, the White House, who garnered the greatest credit. By the time he arrived at his office, hundreds of Muscovites had already gathered to remonstrate with the tank crews outside. The Russian president slipped by them (the Kremlin is not the only government building in Moscow with a secret entrance), but outrage – and a sense of theatre – eventually drove him back outside to join the crowd. ‘I clambered onto a tank, and straightened myself up tall,’ Yeltsin recalled. ‘Perhaps I felt clearly at that moment that we were winning, that we couldn’t lose. I had a sense of utter clarity, of complete unity with the people standing around me.’124 He stood and read out an appeal to Russia’s people and then paused briefly to talk with the men in the tank that had become his platform. It was a matter of minutes outside, but the televised images and photographs became symbolic of an entire people’s victory.
Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin Page 47