CHAPTER 25
THE TOWER
On the December morning in 1990 that Eduard Shevardnadze resigned as foreign minister, I was in Riga to learn more about a strange series of dirty tricks aimed at the Baltic independence movements. There had been explosions near monuments and war memorials, the sort of incidents the army and the KGB could blame on the “radicals” and present as reasons to take “emergency measures” to “reassert an atmosphere of stability.” They already had the language down pat. And why not? All they had to do was reach up to the shelf and bring down the handbook and look under “putsch, cf. Prague ’68, Budapest ’56, et al.” The scenario was all there. All they needed now was the dossier, the pretext.
Shevardnadze, of all people, knew perfectly well what was going on. For months he saw how the military were trying to deceive him, how they tried to embarrass him before the West with their games in the Baltic states and ruin his arms negotiations by moving their tanks and missiles in just such a way that the Americans would catch it on their satellites and blame Moscow for bad faith. He and Yakovlev both saw how the Supreme Soviet chairman, Lukyanov, and the KGB chief, Kryuchkov—those gray Siamese twins—would sit in Politburo meetings and try to unscrew Gorbachev’s head, try to convince him that the “so-called” democrats and Baltic independence people were going to take over with armed insurrections Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Tbilisi, and even the Kremlin. And Gorbachev would listen to every word, nodding sagely. These were the men he trusted, the Party men, the men he’d known since the early days. Sure, they were a little more conservative, but they spoke the same language, the language of the Party, and they knew what discipline was.
I spent the morning of Shevardnadze’s resignation at the editorial offices of Diena (“The Day”), the main pro-independence paper in Riga. The right-ward swing had already started, and so the reporters had no shortage of anecdotes about provocations and intimidation. It was an anxious newsroom. The place had the nasty edge of the family waiting room in intensive care. Something awful was going to happen, they said. It had to.
Then it did. One of the typists, who’d tuned in to the Congress broadcasts on the radio, slowly took off his headphones. He opened his mouth and nothing came out. He was ashen.
“Maybe I got it wrong,” he said in a whisper. “Let me listen again.”
Then he closed his eyes and listened.
“Shevardnadze,” he said. “He’s resigned. He said dictatorship is coming. He is sure of it.”
Shevardnadze had warned that “dictatorship is coming” and that the democrats had scattered “to the bushes.” Shevardnadze had not told anyone that he would make his speech except his family and a couple of his closest aides. As he spoke, his Georgian accent made thicker by the anger in him, the sense of moment, Gorbachev sat at the Presidium as shocked as anyone else in the hall. It was one thing for Moscow intellectuals at the kitchen table to talk about a nascent dictatorship, quite another for Shevardnadze, the second-most-recognized face in the leadership, to put an end to his career. What did this man, who was in a position to know so much, really know?
Everyone in the newsroom at Diena was shattered. Ever since the three Baltic states declared their independence a half year before, they had tried to sustain the conceit that they were already independent. They did not need to ask permission or hold a referendum or in any way pay much attention to the politics of Moscow, because Moscow was elsewhere, a foreign power. Now that conceit was finished, untenable. The Baltic leaders could always trust Shevardnadze (or at least as much as they trusted anyone in Moscow), and now he was telling them that their worst midnight fears were true. Dictatorship was coming, and a conceit of attitude and language, no matter how inventive or assured, would do nothing to stop the brutal charge.
I flew back to Moscow the next morning and went straight to the Kremlin. At the Palace of Congresses, military officers strutted in packs, back and forth across the main foyer. Before, the generals and admirals had always seemed to caucus down near the coatroom, away from the cameras and the reporters. They’d linger by the door in little crowds of olive green and navy blue. They seemed to laugh more than other deputies. After all, they were comrades. They had known each other for years. This democracy stuff, well, it was a lark, a sideshow. But now they were all over the main lobby, dumping one-liners off to the press, confident stuff about how they respected Eduard Amvrosievich, but, my dear American friend, not to fear, everything is under control, don’t go worrying about coups and turns to the right. Everything is fine. Gorbachev’s military adviser, Sergei Akhromeyev—a marshal much beloved by Admiral William Crowe at the Pentagon—chuckled through his teeth when I asked him about a military coup.
“How many times do we have to tell you people?” he said. “Relax! Stop inventing fantasies!”
Upstairs at the buffet tables, Communist Party hacks were stuffing themselves sick with state-subsidized caviar, smoked salmon, sturgeon, cream cakes, and tea. When they thought no one was looking, they bought ten sandwiches more and stuffed them in their briefcases, the better not to be hungry later on.
Meanwhile, the radicals did the death march, up and down the halls. Vitaly Korotich, with that ate-the-canary smile of his suddenly gone, said his friends and he had started making plans “for the trip to Siberia.” He was only half kidding. Afanasyev was more bleary-eyed than usual. The Balts, those who hadn’t left for home already, smoked furiously near the lavatories. Shevardnadze had said in his speech that “democracy would prevail,” but he warned that the democrats, the radicals, were disorganized and dyspeptic, divided, egocentric, petty. They were risking everything. His language was cryptic, but he made it clear that they could no longer depend on the moral authority of Sakharov—he was gone—or the political strength of Gorbachev—that was in doubt.
Finally, toward the very end of the Congress, one of the democrats had a moment of eloquence that helped make sense of Shevardnadze’s great gesture. Ales Adamovich, a war veteran, the best-known writer in Byelorussia, and a founder of Memorial, got up from his first-row seat, walked up the stairs to the stage, and took hold of the lectern, as if for balance. Gorbachev, Adamovich said, “is the only leader in Soviet history who has not stained his hands with blood, and we would all like to remember him as such.” Then he turned for an instant behind him, as if to address Gorbachev directly: “But a moment will come when the military will instigate a bloodbath, and later they will wipe their bloodstained hands against your suit. And you will be to blame for everything. In the West, you are known as a political genius. I would like you to exercise your wisdom again. Otherwise, you will lose perestroika.”
The truth was, it looked lost already. Day by day, the hard-liners made their moves, and there was nothing secret, nothing tricky, about them. Gennadi Yanayev, a witless apparatchik, philanderer, and drunk, was now vice president. Shevardnadze was replaced as foreign minister with Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, a liberal, but without any of the strength or authority of his predecessor. The KGB and the Interior Ministry gave themselves the right to patrol the streets of all major cities. Yazov went on the air complaining about provocations and warned that he would strike back whenever and however he deemed necessary. Kryuchkov announced that he might have to spill a little blood to keep the peace in the republics. And Anatoly Lukyanov, “Lucky Luke,” the creepy chairman of the Supreme Soviet, was always eager to give the floor of the standing parliament to the colonels and crazies from Soyuz (“Union”), the right-wing faction that called, on a daily basis, for Gorbachev’s neck and a state of emergency.
It was an ugly time, and everyone expected it to get uglier. Yakovlev said that the right wing was off on a “vengeful and merciless” counterrevolution, an echo from Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. But Yakovlev, instead of resigning, quietly moved out of Gorbachev’s orbit. Gorbachev would no longer listen to him anymore. What could he do? When I asked Yakovlev what he thought of Gorbachev’s appointment of Yanayev, Yakovlev smiled wearily and said, “The p
resident is a wise man, so I am sure it is a wise decision.” But much later, when he could afford to be less cryptic, Yakovlev told me he saw an “eerie quiet” developing around Gorbachev that winter, as if all his ministers were merely pretending to obey the president, but then went off and did as they pleased. Slowly, they were making a hostage of Gorbachev, and they were counting on the man’s powerful desire to stay in office to keep themselves in control.
Sobchak, the liberal mayor of Leningrad, was the coolest head among the democrats, and when I saw him at the Mariinsky Palace, the headquarters of the city government, he made perfect sense of what was going on. “We are living now through a transition from a totalitarian system to a democratic one, and the forces of dictatorship and democracy live side by side,” he said. “Under these conditions, the danger of a new dictatorship, of military coups or the use of military force against the people, is absolutely real.” It was all so ominous. And nothing had really happened yet.
By the winter of 1990–91, Moscow had become a newspaper fanatic’s dream. Len Karpinsky’s columns and Moscow News were only a part of the morning haul. Having started from nothing, from the wet wash of the Communist Party press, Moscow became the most exciting newspaper city since New York after the war. The Khrushchev “thaw” was a liberalization from which emerged a few works of real literature, but glasnost was a period of journalism, of investigation, sensation, commentary, and scoop.
At first, the most obvious mainstays of glasnost were Moscow News and the weekly magazine Ogonyok. But as glasnost evolved into more genuine freedom of the press, the democratic vista widened. There were breathless papers that rushed to the aid of the radical cause, especially Komsomolskaya Pravda with its circulation of twenty-five million. Literaturnaya Gazeta printed a blend of high-minded cultural criticism, political analysis, and Yuri Shchekochikhin’s startling investigative work on the KGB. Argumenti i Fakti, with a circulation of thirty million, was a kind of bulletin board of two-hundred-word articles and factoids. Izvestia was solid, and for tabloid sensation there were Top Secret’s true crime stories (“Murder on Kutuzovsky Street!”) and Megapolis-Express’s local muckraking. The puckish Kommersant, edited by Yegor Yakovlev’s son Vladimir, covered the emerging business world, letting young entrepreneurs know which mafia clan ruled which district and how to find cheap computers on the black market. In the train stations and street corners, hawkers did a brisk business in Baltic sex papers, neo-Bolshevik mimeograph sheets, and copies of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
For the hard-liners there was Sovetskaya Rossiya, which published the Nina Andreyeva letter in 1988 and the key manifestos leading up to the coup still to come, and Dyen (“The Newspaper of the Spiritual Opposition”), edited by Aleksandr Prokhanov, a theocratic-militarist wacko known affectionately as “the Nightingale of the General Staff.” Among the wire services, the old Big Brother of the ticker, Tass, was as much a fossil as the evening news program Vremya or Pravda, while Interfax and a few others in some of the republics developed the manic intensity of the Associated Press on a good day. Interfax’s leading reporter, Vyacheslav Terekhov, was a breeder reactor in a brown suit, badgering politicians and filing dispatches from breakfast till midnight.
Until 1988 or 1989 at the latest, Moscow News remained the iconoclast, always smashing idols just before the reformers in the leadership did. Ligachev called Moscow News an “ersatz” paper, and small wonder. Moscow News was clearly the voice of the liberals in the Politburo. But it was this lack of real independence at Moscow News, its obvious link to Gorbachev himself, that began to work against it in 1990 and 1991. As the country grew more diverse, as the liberal intelligentsia’s ideas about the future of society and politics grew far more radical than Gorbachev’s own, Moscow News under Yegor Yakovlev began to look a bit timid and almost comically protective of its original patron.
“Without realizing it, Yegor was turning Moscow News into Pravda,” said Vitaly Tretyakov, who was Yakovlev’s deputy at the time. “Just as Pravda was the tribune of the old powers, he wanted Moscow News to be the tribune of the new power, the left-of-center position, the Gorbachev position in the Politburo. When I became Yegor’s deputy, I began to see how many visitors and calls there were from the Central Committee and it was obvious the paper was not operating independently. Len Karpinsky was much more radical than Yegor, but Moscow News could only be as radical as Yegor would allow it to be. Yegor has the personality of a dictator, which may be necessary, but he always wanted to be in possession of ultimate truth, he claimed to know all the answers. None of us could take a step at Moscow News without Yegor’s say-so. You couldn’t mention Lenin, for instance, because Yegor thought he knew all there was to know. And then there was Gorbachev: we could not criticize him directly. And what could someone like Len Karpinsky do? After all, it was Yegor who pulled Len out of obscurity and got him a job.”
By the summer of 1990, millions of people were quitting the Communist Party. The Party that called itself the “initiator of perestroika”—an appalling bit of self-congratulation considering the blood on its hands—had lost the power to convince many of its own members that it supported radical change. At Moscow News, Tretyakov proposed that the paper’s Party committee all quit as one. But Yakovlev said no, they should “stay the course.” As usual, Yakovlev had the votes—Karpinsky’s included.
Vitaly Tretyakov was feeling more alienated from his colleagues at the paper by the day. At thirty-nine, he was not a man of the Gorbachev generation and he had none of the Old Bolshevik background and Party connections of so many of the shestidesyatniki. His parents were laborers. Tretyakov had worked for years on the sort of glossy propaganda magazines that the government printing organs ground out like sausage meat: Soviet Life, Etudes Sovietique, Soviet Woman, and the rest. His time at Moscow News was “a gift,” but the time had come to quit, he decided. “My idea,” he said, “was to start something new, a better Moscow News.”
Tretyakov had very little idea of what he wanted when he began his first planning sessions in the summer of 1990. He knew only that he did not want to tie the fate and tone of his paper to the fate of Mikhail Gorbachev or any other political personality. At first, he tried to lure some of the best-known writers in Moscow to join him, but they all turned him down. No one with a family and an established position was prepared to risk it all on an experiment, a notion. Tretyakov’s one essential break came with the election of liberal democrats to the Moscow City Hall. The new mayor, Gavriil Popov, and his deputy, Sergei Stankevich, were intrigued by Tretyakov’s idea and gave him a start-up grant of 300,000 rubles. No strings attached, Popov said. Remarkably, the city officials kept their word. They have never considered the paper their own and have not interfered in editorial or business policy. “It was just a small investment in the transition to a free press,” Stankevich said.
I had heard about the paper a half year before its first issue appeared. One summer afternoon, I drove to the country town of Peredelkino to visit Andrei Karaulov, a young theater critic, and his wife, Natasha, the daughter of the playwright Mikhail Shatrov. Karaulov was a journalist-hustler the likes of whom I never had seen before or have since—at least not in Moscow. Even in the early days of perestroika he managed to get interviews with one Politburo member and spymaster after another. He somehow made patently evil and slimy men feel comfortable, then tortured them with his combination of unctuous charm and barbed questions. Andrei’s knack was so uncanny that some of his rivals moaned that he must have “dark connections.” At the Peredelkino dacha that afternoon, one of the other guests was a man in his early forties named Igor Zakharov. Zakharov, it turned out, was an extreme cynic who despised himself most of all. He worked for years at the Novosti press agency editing its propaganda sheets. “I am a born functionary,” he said. “I never believed in anything official: not in Communism and not in the possibility of perestroika. I may have published all that shit, but I never believed it. You know that expression ‘L
ife is elsewhere’?” Somehow this willingness to work with odious bureaucrats while believing “otherwise” seemed to wear less well on him than on an older idealist like Karpinsky. It was touching that Karpinsky actually did believe in something when he was young and then believed in something else later on. Zakharov believed in nothing but the hopelessness of just about everything, and the sudden advent of radical changes in the country made his cynicism seem worthless. There were times when Karaulov and Zakharov both made my skin crawl. So when they began telling me about their work with Vitaly Tretyakov on a new newspaper to be called Nezavisimaya Gazeta—“The Independent Newspaper”—not only did I think it would fail, I hoped it would.
I forgot about that discussion and Nezavisimaya Gazeta until six months later when I was flying back from Riga to Moscow on the morning after Shevardnadze’s resignation. On the plane I borrowed two copies of an unfamiliar broadsheet—the first and second issues of Nezavisimaya Gazeta—and I was startled. The front page of the first issue featured little mug shots of the country’s leading ministers—a loutish bunch who looked like the comic thugs in “Dick Tracy,” Flattop, Mumbles, and the rest. Above the pictures was a triple-stack headline: “They Rule Us: But What Do We Know About Them, the Most Powerful People in the Country? Almost Nothing.…” On page five, Yuri Afanasyev published what was surely the most incisive and prescient piece of political commentary of the year: “We Are Moving to the Side of Dictatorship.” In details that proved absolutely accurate, Afanasyev described Gorbachev’s “tragedy,” how his own internal and political limitations left him open to the pressures of the hard-line Communists in the regime. It was just the sort of pointed political critique of Gorbachev that Moscow News could not bring itself to publish. Then on page eight of the first issue—the back page—Tretyakov printed a manifesto declaring that there had never been “in the history of the Soviet Union” a paper independent of political interests. He promised Nezavisimaya Gazeta would be such a paper. The second issue led with the headline “Eduard Shevardnadze Leaves. The Military-Industrial Complex Stays. What Choice Will Gorbachev Make?” A few pages later, Karaulov weighed in with a fascinating interview with the number-two ranking man in the KGB, Filipp Bobkov—the same man who interrogated Len Karpinsky two decades before.
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