Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (15 page)

Yeltsin’s public lectures in the United States were well received, except for one scheduled at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on September 12. The Russian was drunk when he arrived late on September 11 aboard a private plane supplied by Rockefeller. “It was the most astonishing scene I have ever witnessed,” recalled his host in the United States, Jim Garrison, executive director of Esalen’s Soviet American Exchange Program, which engaged in nongovernmental diplomacy with Soviet counterparts. “The president of Johns Hopkins was there to greet Yeltsin, and a young lady with a bunch of roses. When he came down the steps, Yeltsin turned around and urinated on the back tire of the plane.” Yeltsin was bundled into his hotel, where he spent the night drinking Jack Daniels. He was so intoxicated the next morning he could hardly stand, said Garrison. An admirer of Gorbachev, Garrison came to dislike Gorbachev’s “forceful, primitive and highly erratic” rival, who was “completely consumed with a dark passion” for overthrowing the Soviet leader. Yeltsin managed to give his lecture but “with the students laughing at him, not with him.”
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As Yeltsin was struggling through his speech at Johns Hopkins, the White House called to say that the Russian president, who had requested a meeting with President Bush, would be granted a session at 11:30 a.m. in the White House with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, with the possibility that Bush might “drop by.” Bush did not want to offend Gorbachev by giving his fiercest critic anything resembling a summit meeting in Washington, particularly at a time when he and the Soviet leader were working together to achieve a number of American goals, such as the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. The party drove at speed to Washington and arrived at 12:15 p.m. “Jim, you are late,” said Bush’s special assistant, Condoleezza Rice. “Condi, you have no idea,” replied Garrison.

Yeltsin at first refused to enter the White House unless Bush would promise to meet him. He protested, “I am an important man in my country.” But when told Scowcroft would not wait, he crossed the threshold. The national security adviser greeted him truculently with the question “What is the meaning of your trip to Washington?” Yeltsin retorted, “You want to know the meaning of life?” The White House official and his deputy, Robert Gates, were treated to what Gates later described as an “excruciatingly monotonous presentation” from the boorish visitor. Scowcroft at one point closed his eyes as if sleeping.
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When Vice President Quayle dropped by, Yeltsin stared at him hard and long without speaking until Quayle left, crushed. Bush at last appeared in the room. The Russian, suddenly stone cold sober, proceeded to give an earnest account of the situation back home. Later, White House sources told reporters that the visitor was a lightweight with no political future, who had made “off-the-wall” predictions about the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Tipped off about the Russian’s behavior, the
Washington Post
published a colorful account of “Yeltsin’s Smashing Day.” It was lifted by Italian journalist Vittorio Zucconi and embellished for an article that appeared in the Italian tabloid newspaper
La Repubblica
on September 14. Zucconi wrote that, for Yeltsin, America was a bar 5,000 kilometers long and that he had drunk six bottles of spirits and numerous cocktails and embarked on a wild shopping spree. It was partly an invention, based on the
Post
article and the correspondent’s conception of how a full-blooded Russian might behave on his first visit to the United States. The
La Repubblica
article was brought to the attention of Gorbachev, who encouraged
Pravda
to republish it. It duly appeared on September 18 in the party organ, complete with every lurid detail.

This latest attempt to discredit the people’s hero also backfired. Copies of
Pravda
were burned in Red Square by irate Muscovites who saw it as another dirty trick to pull down the one politician they felt they could trust. Three days later, after
Pravda
editorial staff had checked out the story themselves and found it to be partly invented, the paper was forced to apologize—the first ever retraction by the communist flagship.

Later, however, after Yeltsin returned to Moscow, Soviet television obtained footage of him slurring his words at the Baltimore event. Under orders from Gorbachev’s aides, the progressive head of state television, Mikhail Nenashev, was forced to broadcast it nationwide at prime time, though he was against putting it on air at all and took care to include shots of Yeltsin arriving home with a gift of 100,000 disposable syringes for hospitals.
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Yeltsin claimed the tape was deliberately slowed down by the KGB to make him look intoxicated, though even his supporters inside Soviet television doubted that this was true. Nevertheless, the episode deepened Yeltsin’s hatred for Gorbachev and Gorbachev’s contempt for his adversary.

A week after the
Pravda
story appeared, Yeltsin found himself at the center of another embarrassing controversy.
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Sometime after ten o’clock on the exceptionally cold, dry evening of September 28, he appeared soaking wet at the guard post of the Uspenskoye government dacha compound. He told the militiamen there that he had dismissed his driver and was walking the last three hundred meters to visit an old friend, carrying a bunch of flowers, when unidentified men threw him off a bridge into the Moscow River. Alerted by one of the militiamen, his daughter Tanya telephoned Alexander Korzhakov, who grabbed some warm clothes, a bottle of spirits, and some apples and drove to the militia post in his Niva. Yeltsin’s security chief found his boss lying motionless by an electric heater. He was blue with cold, “as if ink was poured over him,” and wearing only wet briefs. His suit was hanging on a nail with blood and grass stains.

Yeltsin told him that after his official car was driven off, four big men shoved him into the back of a red Zhiguli and dropped him from the bridge with a sack tied over his head. He would have drowned if he had not managed to free himself.

The guards made a report, and Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin took note of Yeltsin’s statement. Two weeks later Bakatin recounted the story to the Supreme Soviet, with Gorbachev in the chair. There was a flurry of press interest, with speculation ranging from the possibility that Yeltsin was visiting his mistress—a a cook in a dacha whose occupant was away—and that she had doused him with a bucket of water (the cook denied an affair), or that there was a KGB plot to kill or embarrass him, or even that he had showed up uninvited at a birthday party in Nikolay Ryzhkov’s nearby dacha, which Gorbachev was attending, and KGB guards had been told to teach him a lesson. Looking back years later, Korzhakov was still at a loss about what happened. The river was only a meter deep, he recalled. “It was a joke to think he would have drowned, and Yeltsin was telling me the water was over his head.”
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Gorbachev taunted Yeltsin about the incident in a televised exchange at the Supreme Soviet. But most people in Moscow preferred again to give Yeltsin the benefit of the doubt. He was a flesh-and-blood Russian, one of them, who drank hard, fell into rivers, spoke out, and took the consequences. The more he was attacked by the organs of communism, the more were ordinary Muscovites convinced that he was their man.

On the evening of December 14, 1989, Andrey Sakharov, the intellectual force for change in Russia who complemented Yeltsin’s crude political force, died from a heart attack. The former dissident was eulogized by a guilty nation that realized it had lost its moral compass. His body was laid out in the Academy of Sciences building, and tens of thousands of mourners queued in heavy snow to file past the bier.
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Gorbachev and other Politburo members came and stood briefly to pay their respects to the honest scientist whom they had kept in internal exile as a dissident. Boris Yeltsin stood motionless for several minutes by his body, as if absorbing Sakharov’s spirit and acknowledging his own new role as undisputed leader of the opposition in a fast-changing Russia. Yeltsin was now the most prominent member of a loose collection of elected radicals known as the Interregional Group of Deputies, which had held some chaotic, freewheeling sessions since it was formed in a Moscow hotel lobby during the summer to press for speedier reform.

Before Sakharov was interred in the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery, over 100,000 people attended a funeral rally in a slushy car park at which calls for the end of the Communist Party’s monopoly predominated. Commuters in a passing train opened windows to shout and wave encouragement. The public mood was becoming more defiant of authority. Such displays boded ill for a party that relied on control of an apathetic people to remain in power.

Gorbachev pressed on with the reform process. He encouraged the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union to hold their own democratic elections to make their leaders more accountable to the people. Parliaments already existed in each republic, but the poll results were always fixed by the communist bosses, and the legislatures had little power to legislate.

Individual elections for all the republics were scheduled for March 4, 1990. The campaign in Russia was marked by enormous pro-democracy rallies in support of Yeltsin as a candidate for the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies. For the first time prerevolutionary Russian flags and anticommunist slogans appeared among the demonstrators. Fear of the KGB and police was rapidly evaporating. Things had gone too far for repression of political views, especially when the electoral process bore the stamp of party approval.

Over 8,000 candidates stood for 1,068 seats in the Russian congress. Gorbachev joked as he and Raisa cast their ballots that he had set up a party committee at his home to decide whom to support. He also warned reporters that the process had its limits. To split up the Soviet Union would risk the type of chaos that accompanied the Cultural Revolution in China.

Boris Yeltsin ran in Sverdlovsk District Number 74. He advocated an elected president, a multiparty system, and a separate central bank and military units for the Russian republic. As for other republics like Lithuania, which were pressing for secession, let them leave the Union if they wished, he declared. This would weaken the center and give the Russian people a greater ability to decide their own fate. It would also weaken Gorbachev, who commanded the center, an outcome that Yeltsin found equally, if not more, attractive.

Greeted by wildly enthusiastic fans everywhere he went, Yeltsin was elected with 84 percent of the vote in his constituency, defeating eleven other candidates. He had drawn on a deep well of discontent with the failure of communism to feed and clothe its people adequately and on the perception that Russia was exploited by the other fourteen republics, where people lived better lives.

In response, Gorbachev resolved to strengthen and secure his own power. He persuaded the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies to select by secret ballot a president of the Soviet Union for a five-year term—himself, of course—followed by direct nationwide elections for future presidents. Gorbachev got himself selected to the presidency at a special session in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on March 15, 1990, but with only 59 percent support—mainly because of a partial boycott. The narrowness of the vote drew gasps of astonishment. Vitaly Korotich speculated that in the secret ballot many party apparatchiks who paid lip service to perestroika had ganged up with radicals to vote against Gorbachev. The former saw Gorbachev as Allende, the latter as Pinochet.

The day after the vote, Gorbachev returned to the congress and took an oath to the constitution of the USSR at a table flanked by a ten-foot-long red flag with a golden hammer and sickle and a gold-bordered red star in its upper canton, the official emblem of the USSR. He got the briefest of standing ovations and retreated upstairs for a quiet glass of champagne with Raisa and aide Georgy Shakhnazarov. He was now President Gorbachev, head of state, the leader of the party in what was still a one-party state, commander in chief of the armed forces, and the chief executive of one of the world’s two superpowers. He ordered the KGB security service to ensure that in future the red flag be placed in a special floor holder next to him wherever he might be, in the manner of American presidents. He had the words “Sovetsky Soyuz” (Soviet Union) painted on the side of the presidential plane. He set up a presidential council to which he appointed longtime aides, including Valery Boldin, whom he also promoted to chief of staff.
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Paradoxically, Gorbachev had less authority than ever. He was tainted now by retaining the leadership of the discredited Communist Party, whose Stalinist institutions were proving allergic to change, and this deepened his unpopularity. He was becoming isolated in a shrinking middle ground. He was even under surveillance from his own secret police, a conclusion reached by Korotich after a bizarre incident in the Kremlin. Gorbachev summoned the editor to his office and threw a tantrum about
Ogonyok’s
“unfair” coverage of Ligachev, “but as he screamed, his eyes remained calm and benign, and Alexander Yakovlev sat by, grinning.” It was done for show. “I’m convinced he was bugged,” said Korotich, “and that he knew it.”
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Gorbachev’s popularity suffered more after April 9, when Soviet troops used sapper’s spades and gas to attack a peaceful nationalist demonstration in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, resulting in twenty deaths. Gorbachev claimed that the decision to use force was made by the Georgian leadership without consulting him, and years later he would blame Soviet defense minister Dmitry Yazov for giving the order to a local general. Many did not believe him, especially when later that month in Sverdlovsk he hardened his stance against nationalism, vowing that he would never let the Baltics leave the Soviet Union. He also blustered in the same speech that Yeltsin was finished as a politician.