Down with Big Brother (54 page)

When Gorbachev received Jaruzelski in the Kremlin, he told the Polish
leader that the available evidence indicated that the Katyn massacre had been carried out on the orders of “Beria and his henchmen.”
¹²³
This formula had the effect of shifting responsibility for the massacre away from the Soviet state toward an individual who was later executed for his crimes. The contents of the
osobaya papka
were still considered too shocking to be made public.

If this is a correct interpretation of Gorbachev’s handling of the Katyn affair, he made one fatal miscalculation. He assumed that the secrets of the
osobaya papka
would remain under lock and key virtually indefinitely. He underestimated the political challenge he faced from Boris Yeltsin, who had been nursing a festering sense of grievance about his ouster from the leadership two and a half years previously.

Over the next eighteen months the rivalry between Gorbachev and Yeltsin gradually came to dominate the Soviet political scene. Theirs was to be a fight to the death, involving every conceivable weapon in the Kremlin arsenal, including the
osobaya papka
.

MOSCOW
May 29, 1990

B
ORIS
Y
ELTSIN DESCRIBED
the brutal essence of Kremlin politics when he observed that leaders “have never voluntarily parted with power in Russia.” In the second volume of his memoirs,
The Struggle for Russia
, he tried to explain this “medieval principle” to a predominantly Western audience: “It’s as if leaders were told: you have been given power, so hang on to it. Don’t let it go for anything. Whoever is on top must step on those below.… That is the vertical structure of society. Russia is one and indivisible. Everyone strives upward, to the very top. Higher and higher still. Once you have scrambled to the top, the altitude is so dizzying, you cannot back down.”
¹²⁴

Russian leaders had every incentive to hang on to power. In the West the shock of losing high office is cushioned by new opportunities; there is a revolving door between public and private life. In the Soviet Union losing power was tantamount to losing everything. Under Stalin, ousted Politburo members were lucky to stay alive. Stalin’s successors were more humane. Instead of shooting their defeated rivals, they humiliated them, sending them off to run power stations in Siberia and embassies in Latin America. It was not physical destruction, but it was political destruction, and it was accompanied by the loss of many of the privileges enjoyed by members of the Kremlin circle.

When Yeltsin was expelled from the Politburo in February 1988, he was obliged to give up many privileges, including his Zil limousine and country dacha. The psychological trauma of losing power was even greater. His telephone fell silent; people whom he had regarded as friends and colleagues disappeared from his life; his information network dried up overnight. His former comrades in the Kremlin nomenklatura treated him as a political outcast. He lay awake at night, suffering from appalling headaches, obsessively reviewing every step that he had taken and every word that he had said. There were times when he felt like “crawling up the wall” and could hardly restrain himself from “crying out loud.”

“Politically, I was a corpse,” he later wrote. “All that was left where my heart had been was a burnt-out cinder. Everything around me was burnt out, everything within me was burnt out.”
¹²⁵

Traditionally once a person was tossed out of the charmed inner circle of Soviet power, there was no way back. The victors made sure of that. Yeltsin, however, had the wit to realize that the rules of Kremlin politics were changing rapidly because of Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign. For the first time in seven decades, public opinion was becoming a real factor in Soviet decision making. Gorbachev made use of public opinion in his fight with the bureaucracy. Yeltsin, however, was the first Soviet politician to understand that power could come from the people rather than from the party.

The role of people’s tribune suited the Siberian. Although he had been a
nachalnik
(boss) for most of his life, he knew what it was like to be an underdog. Born dirt poor, he had suffered abuse as a child. More recently he had been disgraced by Gorbachev and the party leadership and had many scores to settle. His immense physical strength and sportsman’s training made him a natural fighter. He had a lot of stamina. He knew almost instinctively how to appeal to a crowd. Like Poland’s Wałęsa, he was able to sense what his listeners were thinking and shape his message to what they wanted to hear. Through a skillful mixture of good humor, common sense, and outright demagoguery, he tapped into the anger of the masses and used it as a weapon against his political opponents.

It was Gorbachev who had inadvertently supplied Yeltsin with the vehicle for his political resurrection, with his decision to create a partially free parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies. After Sakharov’s death in December 1989 Yeltsin became the leader of the “democratic opposition” to Gorbachev.

The Soviet Union’s deepening economic crisis played straight into Yeltsin’s hands. By the summer of 1990 most Russians had lost interest in
Gorbachev’s foreign policy triumphs and the dramatic improvement in relations with the United States. Soviet television viewers reacted to pictures of Germans and Americans chanting, “Gorbie, Gorbie,” with snorts of contempt. Reductions in nuclear arsenals were welcome, but what most interested ordinary Russians were everyday concerns like a good pair of shoes and the length of the line outside the local bread store.

In developing his own political style and identity, Yeltsin did everything to distinguish himself from his former patron. Gorbachev rode around in a long motorcade of Zils; Yeltsin flaunted his dilapidated Moskvich, the Soviet equivalent of the despised East German Trabi. Gorbachev once confided that he shared state secrets with his wife, Raisa; Yeltsin took the view that wives had no business poking their noses into politics.
¹²⁶
Gorbachev had a penchant for long-winded speeches that could go on for two or three hours at a time; when Yeltsin spoke, he was always succinct and concrete. As his popularity declined, Gorbachev seemed to retreat back into his Kremlin fortress and shy away from direct contact with ordinary Russians; Yeltsin made a point of getting out into the Russian heartland and listening to what ordinary people were saying.

But the differences went deeper than style and personality, to the most crucial question of all: Was communism finished? Despite a willingness to redefine the word “socialism,” so that it lost much of its meaning, Gorbachev was unwilling to abandon Communist ideology altogether. He prattled on about the irrevocable “socialist choice” that Russia had allegedly made in November 1917. Lenin remained an unassailable authority for him. Yeltsin, on the other hand, was undergoing an ideological conversion that was both painful and public. Spurred on by his conflict with the Communist Party establishment, he had reexamined his most basic political beliefs, and he had come to the conclusion that he was no longer a Communist.

A turning point in Yeltsin’s intellectual development occurred during his first visit to the United States in September 1989, more specifically his first visit to an American supermarket, in Houston, Texas. The sight of aisle after aisle of shelves neatly stacked with every conceivable type of foodstuff and household item, each in a dozen varieties, both amazed and depressed him. For Yeltsin, like many other first-time Russian visitors to America, this was infinitely more impressive than tourist attractions like the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial. It was impressive precisely because of its ordinariness. A cornucopia of consumer goods beyond the imagination of most Soviets was within the reach of ordinary citizens without standing in line for hours. And it was all so attractively displayed. For someone brought
up in the drab conditions of communism, even a member of the relatively privileged elite, a visit to a Western supermarket involved a full-scale assault on the senses.

“What we saw in that supermarket was no less amazing than America itself,” recalled Lev Sukhanov, who accompanied Yeltsin on his trip to the United States and shared his sense of shock and dismay at the gap in living standards between the two superpowers. “I think it is quite likely that the last prop of Yeltsin’s Bolshevik consciousness finally collapsed after Houston. His decision to leave the party and join the struggle for supreme power in Russia may have ripened irrevocably at that moment of mental confusion.”
¹²⁷

Sukhanov devotes an entire chapter of his book
Tri Goda s Yetsinym
(Three Years with Yeltsin) to describing the wonders of the Houston supermarket. He records Yeltsin’s amazement at being told that the store stocked thirty thousand separate items. (The average Soviet store stocked fewer than a hundred, and many of these were usually “unavailable.”) Every aisle was an eye-opener for the visitors from Moscow. Scarcely had they recovered from the shock of the cheese section, where they saw “red cheese, brown cheese, and lemon-orange cheese,” than they were “literally shaken” by the quality of produce in the vegetable section. They were particularly struck by the radishes, which were as large as good-size potatoes back home and seemed to sparkle beneath the brilliant light of the store. Reluctantly they had to move on from the vegetables to the pastry section.

“You could spend hours in the pastry section,” exclaimed Sukhanov. “As a spectacle this probably surpassed Hollywood. At the counter there was a customer waiting for a huge cake, made in the form of a hockey stadium. The players were made of chocolate. It was a real work of art, but the main thing was that it was available for purchase, completely available.”
¹²⁸

On the plane, traveling from Houston to Miami, Yeltsin seemed lost in his thoughts for a long time. He clutched his head in his hands. Eventually he broke his silence. “They had to fool the people,” he told Sukhanov. “It is now clear why they made it so difficult for the average Soviet citizen to go abroad. They were afraid that people’s eyes would open.”
¹²⁹

The former party apparatchik understood the yearning of the
narod—
the long-suffering Russian people—for a normal life, its anger at being deceived and humiliated. He, too, had been humiliated. He, too, had been deceived. He would help the
narod
secure its revenge against the party establishment. The
narod’s
revenge would also be his.

D
OMINATED BY A MONUMENTAL
marble statue of Lenin, set between Corinthian columns, the long conference hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace had witnessed some of the most dramatic events of the Soviet era. Here Stalin had reached the apotheosis of his political power, at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, when he was officially described as “the greatest man of all ages and nations.”
¹³⁰
Here, too, the Gorbachev generation of Communists had listened, heads bowed, to Khrushchev’s impassioned denunciation of Stalin’s crimes, in his “secret speech” to the Twentieth Congress in 1956. Under Brezhnev the hall had been reserved for meetings of the Supreme Soviet. Every year newspapers around the world had carried the ritual photograph of doddering Politburo members raising their right hands in unanimous approval of party policy.

After serving as a totalitarian echo chamber for more than five decades, the great Kremlin hall had finally been turned into a real debating chamber. A large electronic scoreboard, placed to one side of Lenin, kept track of the innumerable votes. There were long lines of people waiting to speak at the microphones scattered around the hall. Outside, in the lobby, journalists rushed frantically about, nabbing deputies as they came out of the hall. Tables were piled high with draft resolutions, political pamphlets, official transcripts. On one side of the lobby there was a line of display boards, filled with telegrams from voters. The texts varied, but the message was always the same: The people’s candidate for chairman of the new Russian parliament was Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.

Egged on by Gorbachev, who accused Yeltsin of turning his back on “socialism,” the Communists did everything they could to prevent the renegade from gaining the highest political post in Russia. But their efforts to smear him backfired. The Communist candidate was so unappealing—both politically and physically—that he had trouble gaining the votes of all his fellow Communists. Independent deputies resented the Soviet president’s open interference in the election process. The longer they took to make up their minds, the more telegrams supporting Yeltsin poured into the Kremlin. After two inconclusive rounds of voting, Yeltsin was finally elected speaker on the third ballot, by a margin of just four votes.