Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (17 page)

Gorbachev wanted to proceed slowly, bringing the hard-liners with him. He summoned newspaper editors for a private meeting at which he blasted the radicals in the Congress, singling out Yeltsin by name and referring with contempt to their program of “a multiparty system, the right to leave the USSR, a market economy, free press, everyone doing whatever they please.” Such concepts, less than two years before they all came to pass, were still unthinkable, even outrageous, to rank-and-file members of the party. “We are knee deep in kerosene,” Gorbachev warned the editors. “And some people are tossing matches.”
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CHAPTER 12

DECEMBER 25: EARLY AFTERNOON

Alone with Andrey Grachev in his Kremlin office, and with just over four hours before he is to deliver his resignation speech, Mikhail Gorbachev takes a pen and begins rehearsing it aloud.
¹
He asks his aide for his opinion as he goes through it, marking points where he has last-minute queries about the precise wording. Since his appointment as presidential spokesman in September, Grachev has become one of the small inner circle around Gorbachev. The president has grown to appreciate his sure touch and smooth, sophisticated approach to public relations.

Gorbachev cannot bring himself to say he is
resigning
. He decides to insert instead, “I hereby
discontinue my activities
at the post of president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

Having gone through several rewrites, the speech is a balance between a justification of the policies Gorbachev pursued and a statement of his dismay at how history has played out. It betrays just a little of the bitterness he feels about the way Yeltsin and the republic presidents trumped him in the political games of the last few weeks. But he has indicated to Yeltsin he will not use the occasion to make an outright attack on him or what he has done. It would not in any case be dignified to do so.

Nevertheless, Gorbachev makes one substantial amendment to prick his opponent. In the text he notes that it is vitally important to preserve the democratic achievements of the last few years, “and they are not to be abandoned, whatever the circumstances, and whatever the pretexts.” It can be taken as a warning that Yeltsin and his successors might seek undemocratic ways to consolidate their power. The final version also contains a small segment from an earlier draft that Gorbachev dropped and then decided to put back in. It states that the decisions made by Yeltsin and his fellow conspirators “should have been made on the basis of popular will.” That too is likely to irritate Yeltsin.

The bulk of the 1,200-word address is the final contribution to the Gorbachev presidency of Anatoly Chernyaev, who has drafted practically every important speech delivered by the Soviet leader. He has been working on the valediction since Gorbachev asked him to start drafting a text two weeks back. That was when the president acknowledged for the first time that the end might be near. Other aides provided drafts, but they were for the most part rejected. Four days ago Chernyaev thought he had completed his task, but Gorbachev twice went back to the basic text, and twice got his adviser to completely rework it. Even now the president is still tinkering. Alexander Yakovlev produced his own draft, which was conciliatory to Yeltsin and contained frank admissions of mistakes. Gorbachev was tempted to adopt much of Yakovlev’s apologia, but Chernyaev categorically rejected it as “a capitulation and a whining,” and the president in the end agreed.

A week ago, when Eduard Shevardnadze was asked to come to the Kremlin and provide input, he also took issue with Yakovlev’s version. The Georgian was in a foul temper when he arrived and was in no mood for making any concessionary gestures or for kowtowing to Yeltsin. He had just been told brusquely by a clerk in the foreign ministry building in Smolenskaya-Sennaya Street that Yeltsin had liquidated the Soviet foreign ministry and claimed its personnel and assets for Russia. Shevardnadze had to leave his seventh-floor minister’s office immediately, as Russian foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev wanted to move in.

Yeltsin’s people are cynical and ill-mannered, he complained in his thick Georgian accent. “Their main purpose is to get armchairs; they all look at each other and boast about the offices they got in Smolenskaya-Sennaya.”
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He never liked Kozyrev, the nondescript but ambitious Russian foreign minister called the “Whisperer” behind his back because of his soft voice. Shevardnadze resents that neither Yeltsin nor Kozyrev had the decency to tell him to his face that his ministry was being whipped out from under his feet. He and his closest aide, Sergey Tarasenko, are also fearful for their lives and those of Gorbachev and other Kremlin officials. “We don’t know who is going to shoot whom,” Tarasenko confided to Jim Garrison, the former Esalen executive now heading the International Foreign Policy Association, an organization sponsored by former U.S. secretary of state George Shultz and Shevardnadze to mobilize aid for Soviet children, and who happened to be visiting Shevardnadze the day he was ejected from his office.

Shevardnadze had glumly forecast to Gorbachev’s aides that there would be a new putsch and an explosion of violence and repression on a mass scale as a result of Yeltsin’s actions in dismantling the Soviet Union. Alexander Yakovlev echoed his pessimism. He predicted that, “
dai Bog”
(please, God), Yeltsin wouldn’t last longer than the spring.
³

The final version of the farewell address, Chernyaev notes, is “born of Gorbachev’s suffering through this excruciating December.” In the place of Yakovlev’s “whining” he has made sure that it includes a measure of defiance and self justification and that it blames Yeltsin by implication for ending the Soviet Union. The draft portrays Gorbachev as the principled player in the political drama taking place, though he has no control over the fast-moving events now. It proclaims that he has fulfilled the historical task of leading a totalitarian country towards democracy. It includes a passing acknowledgment by Gorbachev of his own failings, though he distances himself from self-blame by using the royal “we,” with the formula, “We certainly could have avoided certain errors.”

As the final draft of the address is being typed up, Pavel Palazchenko comes to the anteroom of Gorbachev’s office. He reminds Chernyaev that George Bush expects a final call from President Gorbachev. “Well I guess today is the day,” Chernyaev tells him.

But it is Christmas Day in the Western world, and everyone is on vacation. When Palazchenko calls the American embassy in Moscow to request a connection to Washington, no one is there to take the call. The embassy is closed. A voice on the answering machine gives only the number of the marine on duty in case of an emergency concerning an American citizen. He could turn for help to the foreign ministry in Moscow, which has the capacity to organize a call to the American president through the embassy in Washington, but these diplomatic assets are in the hands of Yeltsin’s team, whose members are not to be trusted.

The interpreter goes through his notebook and finds the Moscow home number of Jim Collins, the U.S. deputy head of mission, to whom he explains his predicament. Collins gives him the number in Washington of the State Department operations desk, which Palazchenko calls on an open line through the Moscow operator. At the State Department, the duty officer advises him that President Bush is spending Christmas Day at Camp David. He patches Palazchenko through to the marine on duty at the forest retreat. The U.S. president is still asleep—it is early morning in America—but the officer says Bush will take the call after he wakes up. They fix a time for the connection: 5 p.m. in Moscow, 9 a.m. in Washington.
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Fully recovered from his after-lunch bout of depression, Gorbachev invites Ted Koppel and Rick Kaplan into his office to continue filming their historical record for ABC television. He makes a point of emphasizing the peaceful nature of the transition and that nothing like this has ever happened in Russian history. “The process, after all, is a democratic one.”

Koppel asks if Gorbachev could retain power if he wanted, given that he is still head of the Soviet armed forces. “There are people who change their positions to make sure they keep power,” replies Gorbachev coyly. “To me that is unacceptable. If what is happening didn’t matter to me and if I wanted to remain in government more than anything else, then that would be not too difficult to achieve.”
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It is a vain boast. The moment has passed when Gorbachev could achieve such a goal, though he will never concede that. Years later, putting a gloss on his ousting, he claims that sometimes his hands were itching to use force, but that he realized such a course of action could lead to a civil war and even a global nuclear conflict.

Gorbachev emphasizes to Koppel the most important message he wants to get across to the Americans, that there will be no nuclear foul-up. He draws attention to the portion of the speech containing his assurance to the world that he has done everything in his power during the transitional period to ensure safe control over nuclear weapons.

The American journalists are once more impressed at the calmness of the president. He is more relaxed than some days ago, Gorbachev tells them, as “the psychological stress is hardest until you make the decision.” Kaplan is struck too by his proud demeanor. “The one word I would use is ‘dignified,’” he recalled. “It was evident he wanted to be perceived as in control, not in control of the Soviet Union or Russia, but in control of himself.”
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CHAPTER 13

DICTATORSHIP ON THE OFFENSIVE

In the wake of the Russian parliament’s declaration of sovereignty in June 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had the option of trying to destroy each other or of entering into a political alliance. Something drastic had to be done. The Soviet economy was on the point of collapse. There were now chronic shortages of everything in the Russian capital. Even cigarettes had become scarce, and there were minor tobacco riots in several cities. The longest queues that summer were at photographers’ studios, as Muscovites were obliged to apply for identity cards for city stores to prevent country people stripping the shelves bare. Ration coupons were issued for clothes, shoes, and domestic appliances. Sugar was restricted to two kilograms per month per person. Butter was rarely seen. Flour and salt disappeared from the shops, and bread ran out daily. Meat was only available in expensive markets. Consumers were hoarding, making the shortages worse.

People told bitter anecdotes about how bad things had become. A forgetful old man stands outside a supermarket with an empty shopping bag, wondering if he has done his shopping or not. Many jokes were aimed at party privileges. In Congress a deputy complains to the presidium, “I want to work like I do under communism and live like under capitalism,” and is told, “No problem! Join us on the platform.” A Russian moves to Latvia in the hope that one day he will wake up abroad (he soon does). Another anecdote doing the rounds goes: “How does a clever Russian Jew talk to a foolish Russian Jew? By telephone from New York.”

The humiliation of Russians at their degraded state was compounded by the arrival of food parcels from Germany, the country the Soviet Union defeated in World War II. Praskoviya Fyodorovna, age seventy-eight, who had served as a wireless operator in the war, wept as she opened a typical cardboard box sent by a family in Dusseldorf. It contained a tin of cocoa, three slim bars of milk chocolate, two bulky slabs of Edel marzipan, a packet of wafer biscuits, a kilo of Diamant flour, and packages of sugar and rice. “And now they help the victorious,” she sobbed.
¹

In Moscow the people standing in line reacted with indifference, even anger, when on October 15, 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leading role in the easing of tensions between East and West and the freedoms gained by Eastern Europe. As far as they were concerned, their lot had worsened while their leader was feeding his ego on the back-slapping international circuit. In an extraordinary swipe at his president, Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov told reporters, “We must remember this certainly was not the prize for economics.”
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At first the rivals chose to enter into an alliance to meet the crisis. The command system having failed so catastrophically, Gorbachev and Yeltsin agreed to cooperate on a crash program to create a market economy. The task of drawing up a blueprint was given to a joint working group led by radical economist Stanislav Shatalin, a balding adviser to Gorbachev with a quick sense of humor who referred to himself as the Diego Maradona of economics, and Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister, Grigory Yavlinsky. Gorbachev and Yeltsin at last had a civilized meeting. For five hours in late August, as the rain beat down incessantly outside the Kremlin, they agreed to implement the forthcoming economic plan together. The Russian leader felt Gorbachev treated him as an equal for the first time. He mollified the Soviet president by declaring that for Russia to go it completely alone would mean destroying the Union, and he had rejected that notion.

The accord between Gorbachev and Yeltsin didn’t last. Gorbachev balked when Shatalin and Yavlinsky produced a five-hundred-day plan similar to the shock therapy applied in Poland earlier in the year. It involved the step-by-step lifting of price and currency controls, withdrawal of state subsidies, and largescale privatization, with October 1, 1990, as the starting date. The Soviet leader caved in to ferocious pressure from the military and industrial sectors, which feared losing their generous subventions, and from party hard-liners who saw in the plan the disintegration of the Soviet Union if the center lost its ability to issue commands to the republics. In mid-October, unable to give up the old Bolshevik notion of the leader as the ultimate social designer, or of himself as the wise compromiser, he reconciled Shatalin’s plan with a reform program drawn up earlier by Soviet Prime Minister Nikolay Ryzhkov. A vain apparatchik known as the “Weeping Bolshevik” for his emotional outbursts, Ryzhkov proposed keeping much of the old system intact and maintaining Kremlin control over all the rights designated for the republics. Gorbachev considered and then ruled out holding a referendum on his compromise.
³