by Gail Sheehy
Thatcher described for me how she felt stepping off the plane in Moscow. “I was more nervous than I’ve ever been.” The thirteen-hour tête-à-tête between the Iron Lady of capitalism and the Iron-Toothed Man of communism was unprecedented, the longest time Thatcher had spent with any head of state. Their meeting was described by observers with voluptuous adjectives—“vigorous,” “deep,” “passionate.” Mrs. Thatcher emerged, tossing her head back with an uncharacteristic cascade of laughter.
During their talks, Gorbachev confided his frustration over his first two meetings with President Reagan, Thatcher told me. The Russian leader exploded, “He doesn’t know policy!” Thatcher could sympathize. She said she enjoyed hearing Reagan’s Hollywood stories, but given his lazy work habits, she despaired of discussing “privatization” with him, a term she had invented. Instead of reading his briefing books to prepare for the 1983 summit in Williamsburg, Reagan had watched The Sound of Music on TV.
I learned later that the prime minister and the general secretary had once become locked in conversation at a Kremlin banquet. They ignored the ballroom full of guests, pecked at their food, arms touching, with eyes only for each other. On their night out at the Bolshoi they held up the second act of Swan Lake while they debated methods of grain silage. When they finally reentered their box, Thatcher, resplendent in black lace, rudely inserted herself between Mikhail and his wife, Raisa. Highly displeased, Raisa muscled her way into their discussion of Western nuclear policy.
THATCHER HAD THE SAME kind of affinity with the other superpower leader. Both she and Reagan were out-of-fashion conservatives when they first became friends. Some predicted that historians would cast them as the leaders who together gave capitalism back its confidence. White House insiders confirmed that she flirted with Reagan, to their mutual advantage. He taught her about teleprompters and gave her clearance to use a base on Ascension Island for staging strikes on the Falklands. She lent him her bases to launch the bombing of Libya. Thatcher had no compunction about giving her Ronnie a dressing-down. Nevertheless, the Reagan-Thatcher axis was, in the words of her biographer, Hugo Young, “the most enduring personal alliance in the Western world throughout the 1980s.”
Ultimately, the results of her debates with Gorbachev about nuclear disarmament were world changing. Thatcher finally gave her blessing to the new peace formula that he and Reagan devised to replace MAD—mutual assured destruction—which marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
Thatcher wound up our interview at 10 Downing by returning to her view of dissent as a socialist-communist conspiracy. It was “them,” the counterculture radicals, who used intimidation to prevent free speech and shut down universities, she insisted. When I raised the liberal argument, she lifted her arms skyward with a war cry: “That is why you’ve got to stand up for what you believe in, and thank goodness there are some people who always will.”
“But look at you now—you have survived all of these attacks,” I said, expecting we could end on a positive note.
“I HAVE TO FIGHT EVERY DAY, STILL,” came the thundering reply.
My final question elicited a surprising reply. Who did she see as her historical counterpart? “You go back to the person who really had to fight for what he believed in and—I couldn’t begin to compare myself with him—it was Abraham Lincoln.”
WHEN MY STORY APPEARED in Vanity Fair in June 1989, “The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher,” it stimulated a lot of talk and talk-show fodder. But the response in England was literally electric. “THE ION LADY” blared the Daily Mail’s front page. Rivals as well as the opposition taunted the PM during Question Time over her watery vibrations.
Following on the success of the Thatcher piece, Tina Brown asked me if I would like to go to Russia and write the first character portrait of a Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. I was intrigued. Gorbachev was all over the news in 1989 as Westerners tried to decipher whether his startling reforms would really change the one-party Communist state. But Gorbachev refused interviews with print journalists.
The more I thought about reporting on the convulsions in the Soviet Union, the more fired up I got. The real draw was studying a formerly rock-solid Communist boss whose persona had already been “transformed” two or three times, according to my sources at the CIA. As Gorbachev tried to lead his “revolution from the top down,” he would surely go through another mind-bending change.
On my first trip in the summer of 1989, I discovered that nothing could be done in the Soviet Union without a “connection,” meaning a fixer. For starters, there were no phone books. Every call had to be preceded by an introduction. Using my wretched Berlitz Russian, I hired one of the new mercenary entrepreneurs as my translator. Young Sergei appeared, miraculously, with just the part I needed to make my portable printer work on Russian current. I was in good hands.
One evening I entertained some writer friends for dinner, including the novelist Anatoly Pristavkin. When his English-speaking wife, Marina, began to translate for her husband, Sergei butted in aggressively.
“I will translate,” he demanded with a rap of fingers on the table.
The next time I had dinner with the Pristavkins, it was alone.
“Gail, you must know something,” they said. “Sergei is KGB.”
“What gave you the clue?” I asked, astonished.
Marina explained in a typically Russian way. “His fat face, his perfect English, his sudden appearance in your life with everything you need—why?” I explained that an American woman associated with our embassy recommended him. Marina’s eyebrows shot up. “You must think this way—in probabilities. One out of every three Soviets is connected to the KGB. So why not Sergei?”
At least, I hoped, my driver was okay. Oleg was a great fixer. His parents were highly cultured members of the Moscow intelligentsia, but Oleg had the sunken-cheeked, wolfish look of many young Soviets. He was utterly amoral. Shortly after I returned home from that extended stay in the Soviet Union, I learned that my every move and contact had indeed been reported to the KGB. From what they learned about me, I deduced that the informer was not Sergei, my translator. It was Oleg.
The day before my next trip, I was waiting on tenterhooks for my visa. Suddenly a fax came in from Moscow! I dived for the machine, expecting it to be from the inner sanctum of the Kremlin.
“You bring me another Sharp Wizard. I know your arrival time. I meet you at airport. OLEG.”
Amazing. People didn’t have phones. But a twenty-six-year-old black marketer could fax me his extortion order for a computer worth $350. On my next trip, I managed to evade Oleg at the airport. He was outraged. When I didn’t respond to his phone calls, he chased me down the street. He finally had the audacity to lure the wife of a top diplomat out of the U.S. Embassy compound. On the street, the young thug raged at her about my having shortchanged him and threatened that the Americans wouldn’t get away with this. It was a stunning display of the power of the new Russian “mafia” born in the vacuum between state power and dollar power.
I was getting nowhere in finding a fixer. Just then, Clay called to tell me to jump on a plane. We were invited to a dinner in New York by Mort Zuckerman, the real estate tycoon and publisher of U.S. News and World Report, who could introduce me to a real Russian poo-bah. Nikolai Shishlin was a consultant to the Central Committee, the ruling body of the Soviet Communist Party. I made my case for the importance of a character portrait of Gorbachev. Shishlin was in favor: “Perhaps in six months or a year I can talk him into such an approach.”
“Wonderful!” I pretended, whereupon Shishlin peered over his thick glasses with a sardonic smile and added: “If nothing happens.”
What happened, of course, was the collapse of the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain, culminating in November 1989 in the teardown of the Berlin Wall and the hurtling exodus of East Germans out of Communist confinement. I developed the habit of rising well before six every morning to phone Moscow before the measly thirty-eight trunk lines
that serviced the entire country overloaded for the day. There were no answering machines, no secretaries, just the hit-or-miss chance one might catch the fixer at his office. When I would be just about to scream, the voice of this quintessential apparatchik would suddenly answer.
“Da.”
“Nikolai?”
“That’s me.” Sound of a whipped dog.
Shishlin would never say no. Always “Just now it is not possible.” Or “Call me back at four.” With a promise from Shishlin that I might go to Gorbachev’s home village, I flew to Russia in September. Nobody knew anything about my “permission” from the top. Over and over again, I was able to talk my way through barriers and interview his teachers, friends, his first girlfriend, and on up to the party apparatchiks who were dying to learn something personal about the top dog. Soviets appreciated a foreign writer who wasn’t afraid of flouting the rules.
To go to Privolnoye, Gorbachev’s village, was a journey back in time to Chekhov’s Russia. In the country people, one could see the blows of history in their twisted bodies and pained eyes. In the eight precious hours allotted to me in Gorbachev’s village, what impressed me the most was how young Misha had survived. He was born into the first year of a Stalin-made famine that killed thirty thousand people. If the Gorbachev family of free farmers had not swung over early to the Communist government’s side, earning the scant privileges of local officialdom, they would not have been able to keep the baby Misha alive.
Tina Brown was bold enough to put my first Gorbachev story on the cover of the February 1990 issue: “Red Star: The Man Who Changed the World.” For readers of Vanity Fair to see the face of a bearish old man was a startling departure from the usual come-hither Hollywood starlet, but Tina was thrilled. “That was a real breakthrough for us; nobody ever wrote a thing about Russian leaders’ private lives.” The story got tremendous buzz.
I asked Shishlin if President Gorbachev had read my piece in Vanity Fair and if he had any reaction. He said, “I think he rather enjoyed it.”
IN THE SPRING OF 1990, my Russian writer friends alerted me that Gorbachev was having a series of “emotional accidents.” They sent me translations of his lengthy public diatribes where he veered off into streams of consciousness: “Sometimes I have this crazy idea . . . that I should withdraw my candidacy.” He accused his so-called democratic deputies of trying to drive him crazy. “They want to make the leadership come off the track!”
My hunch was that we were beginning to see the disintegration of Gorbachev’s inner control. Events were now rushing past him as if on some cosmic slide, scattering even his powers of improvisation into a shower of quickly extinguished sparks. Could Gorbachev change himself once more, this time liberating himself from the Communist ideal implanted in him from the age of sixteen? This story was worth a book. HarperCollins signed me to expand my stories about Gorbachev into a biography.
So I moved to Moscow for the month of March 1990 to watch firsthand the transformation of “the New Gorbachev.” This time I was prepared to approximate living within the economy like a Moscow housewife. Friends made on previous trips generously offered an apartment in the Lenin Hills, not far from Moscow University. I had packed a huge trunk full of packaged food and soups, vacuum-packed salami, cans of tuna and sardines—stuff I hated, but, hell, it would keep me fed. Before leaving the luxurious cocoon of an international jetliner, I squirrelled away airline sugar, salt, pepper, and butter. It felt as if I was “going under.”
The Lenin Hills were leafy and pretty with the pleasant energy of a university town. My apartment building was an eight-story Stalin-era redbrick block just off the most modern boulevard in Moscow: Leninsky Prospekt. When I first entered my own kitchen, it was with a shudder of dismay. Nothing helpful to a woman was made in the Soviet Union: no paper towels, aluminum foil, or plastic wrap; no napkins or toilet paper; no mops or brooms; not even sanitary napkins.
Most Soviets I met believed that their weaknesses had been engineered genetically. This belief was murderously self-fulfilling. Whenever I asked my Russian friends how long they thought it would be before they would feel truly free, the answer was deeply pessimistic. “You have to be born free to feel it.” The most optimistic predication was “Maybe for our children’s children.”
Whenever I spoke about Gorbachev with my neighbor Irina Peterhov, her soft voice took on a harsher cast. “This is the question I would ask if I ever had an interview with Mr. Gorbachev. ‘Who is responsible for the wreckage of our society for the last seventy years? The Communist Party, or Mickey Mouse?’”
I had become almost obsessed with finding out what lay inside the Central Committee complex, the citadel of power in the USSR.
Finally granted an interview with the number-two Soviet power figure, Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s propaganda chief, I entered the cavernous building. Hush of a vacuum. No evidence of work. No secretaries, no aides with computers, no phone banks or fax machines or printers spewing out briefing papers. Just miles of blond veneer, bare bookshelves, closed doors.
Alexander Yakovlev’s massive forehead protruded as if his brain was almost too big for his skull. Deep lines flared above his eyes like lightning flashes. His skin was colorless. I asked if Gorbachev was shaken by reports that he had lost the support of the intelligentsia. It was a raw wound. “We are very respectful of the intelligentsia,” Yakovlev said defensively. “All of us can be called intelligentsia.”
I reminded Yakovlev that he had once written that ultraleftists were the curse of any revolution. Was this how he saw Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s challenger on the far left?
“The ultraleftists must be isolated,” he said darkly.
“How?” I asked the propaganda chief.
“Moral isolation.”
After this chilling answer, I felt bold enough to ask the number-two power in the country if he worried that Gorbachev’s enemies were poisoning his mind. “Are they trying to drive him crazy?” Yakovlev’s answer spoke volumes about the Russian people
“We are not always stable people,” Yakovlev said.
AFTER A YEAR AND A HALF of research and four extensive trips to the Soviet Union, I sensed that Gorbachev could be overthrown at any moment. Even though I had not met him in person, I felt I knew him, almost killing myself in the summer of 1990 to write his biography in three months. My editor impressed upon me that the manuscript’s drop-dead deadline was Labor Day. Only then could they publish before December, when we anticipated that Gorbachev would win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Clay shut me in my study in East Hampton and Ella brought me lots of iced tea. I wrote six and a half days a week with breaks only to swim or eat. The morning after Labor Day, I pushed Send to my editor. Her return e-mail took my last breath away:
I know you will understand, as the author of Passages, that the time has come for me to leave publishing and go climb a mountain.
It almost made me sorry I’d ever written that damn book about life transitions.
In December 1990, Gorbachev was indeed awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Eight months later he was summarily overthrown. For all his courage in changing the psychology of his people, he was left in the dust by the horsemen of history. The last line of my biography of Mikhail Gorbachev cast him as a tragic figure. He was the man who changed the world but lost his country.
BOTH THATCHER AND GORBACHEV WERE scuttled off the world stage ignominiously, both shouting their unshakable beliefs in themselves. For Thatcher, it was neither the socialists nor the communists she hated who engineered her abrupt downfall. It was a coup by her own star boys who plotted a revolt behind her back. On November 20, 1990, the “perpetual prime minister” lost her place as Conservative Party leader. She returned home from a state visit to find her nearly twelve years in power finished off by her own MPs. Rarely seen in tears, on the traumatic day that Thatcher was ushered out of her home at No. 10 after announcing her resignation, she broke down and wept. She confided to her Ronnie that she felt “betrayed.�
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Reagan left office venerated around the world. He and Thatcher are the only two world leaders in modern times whose political philosophies became memorialized in “isms.” Reaganism and Thatcherism live on today. Indeed, together the two leaders set the developed world on the conservative course of free-market capitalism, including the new Russia. It would take almost twenty years before the near collapse of the American economy exposed the danger to the world of government run by rich people’s political bribery and the slow starving of the middle class.
Charmed as I was by the animal magnetism between Thatcher and Gorbachev, I had been working on a play about a fantasy romance between the two leaders. Maggie and Misha even had a two-week workshop production off Broadway. So I had a very personal reason to be disappointed when both were sent off to political Siberia. Incurable romantic that I am, I wanted the fantasy to come true!
CHAPTER 33
The Silent Passage
“I WANT YOU TO DO THE POPE.”
Tina Brown was deliciously cocky after seven years of growing Vanity Fair into the most talked-about magazine around town and actually making it profitable. By 1991, she thought we could “do” anybody.
“The pope! Jesus, Tina, I’m not even Catholic!”
I had come to her apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street early that Saturday in January armed with an equally preposterous idea. “I want to write about menopause.”
“Excuse me?”
It took Tina an uncharacteristically long time to respond—maybe more than a minute. She had just had a baby. She was in that cotton-brained dither of hormonal chaos that overtakes the newly postpartum woman, not unlike the static in my brain brought on by menopause. We were living in alternate realities. The last thing on Tina’s mind was the end of fertility. But being Tina Brown, she knew a taboo when she heard one and she liked nothing better than breaking taboos.