Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (18 page)

The radical reformers were furious. Feeling betrayed, Yeltsin called the compromise a blueprint for chaos, saying, “You cannot cross a hedgehog with a snake.”
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In a speech he threatened that Russia would go ahead and implement the five-hundred-day plan on its own. Outraged, Gorbachev called an emergency meeting of his presidential council in the Kremlin. There was near hysteria over Yeltsin’s threat and the possibility that other republics would follow in defying the center. Chernyaev found the room filled with fear and hatred.
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Ryzhkov screamed that they would all be shot or hanged, that everything was out of control. At one point Gorbachev left the room briefly to greet a U.S. delegation led by Dick Cheney, switching as he did to the role of garrulous and charming master statesman, and then, as soon as the Americans had gone, continuing his outburst in the corridor against Yeltsin’s people, “who all deserve a good punch in the face.”

Yeltsin had as yet no way of carrying out his threat to go it alone. His departments had little or no resources to implement any economic plan. His industry minister, Viktor Kisin, complained that at the time there was only one person in the ministry—the minister himself, and there was no office, no chair and no telephone. Yeltsin’s helplessness was exposed when his officials placed an order for two armored limousines with the Gorky factory in Moscow in October. The order was refused, on directions from the Kremlin.

The rivals met again in the Kremlin, but another five hours of discussion led nowhere. At the meeting Yeltsin asked, “Why are you moving to the right so sharply?” “Because society is moving to the right,” replied Gorbachev. “You then simply do not know what is happening in society,” retorted Yeltsin. The next day Yeltsin reported the conversation to the Russian parliament, in what Chernyaev described as his usual rude and insulting manner. Gorbachev complained to his aides he would be forced to declare war on Yeltsin.

But Gorbachev was becoming isolated from Soviet society, and Yeltsin had the backing of the people. On November 7, after Gorbachev and his comrades had reviewed the annual military parade in Red Square commemorating the October Revolution, Yeltsin appeared at the head of an anticommunist crowd organized by the radical group Democratic Russia. They carried pictures of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and banners displaying black humor, such as “1917 the crime—1990 the punishment.”

Gorbachev’s knowledge of what was happening in society at this time came principally from his aide, Valery Boldin, who was secretly scheming to subvert his boss. The blandest of bureaucrats, with square face and outsize horn-rimmed spectacles, Boldin wielded great influence over Gorbachev’s diary and routine. Anyone who wanted to see the president had to go through the dogmatic apparatchik whom Gorbachev had recruited from
Pravda’s
editorial team in 1981. Besides being Gorbachev’s gatekeeper, he was head of the General Department of the Communist Party, which gave him control over archives and documents circulated by the Central Committee. Even Gorbachev’s close aide Anatoly Chernyaev only learned much later that Boldin had a secret information department that supplied Gorbachev with, in Chernyaev’s words, a “tendentious concoction” of negative materials designed to poison him against his pro-reform friends.
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Boldin in time would admit that he despised Gorbachev “for his lordly manner and contempt for his subordinates.” He had never forgotten the humiliating way his position had been confirmed six years before, when he was summoned into the presence of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev and told that he had lived up to their expectations. An important party official in his own right, Boldin felt he was treated as a servant. Yet he was so successful at hiding the rancor he felt that Raisa was fooled into thinking he was her loyal ally. She would find out before long how wrong she was. Boldin was unpopular with the president’s staff for his oily attitude towards Gorbachev. Chernyaev never spoke warmly of Boldin, and senior secretariat member Olga Lanina couldn’t stand him. Grachev thought he was obsessed with the power that he wielded. One of Boldin’s quirks was collecting books bound in fine-tooled leather that exposed convoluted Masonic conspiracies favored by right-wing extremists. But Boldin lived up to his Bolshevik ideals. He refused the perks of his status, declining a Chaika, access to a special clinic, and a larger dacha, and was contemptuous of the Gorbachevs’ taste for the lavish benefits of office.

The alarmist information that Boldin fed his master came from KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, a sixty-seven-year-old admirer of Stalin who was also posing as a reformer. The short, baby-faced Kryuchkov, nicknamed Cherub by his staff, was a conspiracy theorist with a taste for Chivas Regal who wore a cardigan under his jacket and looked more like a college professor than a Soviet spymaster. Operating from a cavernous oak-paneled office on the fourth floor of the KGB building, with a portrait of Gorbachev on the wall, he produced a stream of reports claiming that Western intelligence agencies were intent on the destruction of the Soviet Union as a great power. Kryuchkov’s agents tapped the telephones of the leading reformers, including Yeltsin and Alexander Yakovlev, and provided the transcripts, via Boldin, to their most avid reader—Gorbachev. Every day the Soviet president would go through hundreds of pages of these reports compiled secretly on his closest colleagues.

On December 11, 1990, in a chilling throwback to darker days, the head of the KGB appeared on the main evening television news to warn, “at the president’s request,” that the pro-democracy movements in the republics were the creatures of foreign money and intelligence and that “we in the security forces have made our choice: we stand for the flowering of our socialist homeland.”

A horrified Eduard Shevardnadze thought Kryuchkov’s rhetoric smacked of the 1930s. It seemed to Palazchenko that the hawks wanted to welcome Gorbachev back as a prodigal son who had sown his wild oats and was now returning to the fold. It was evident to Chernyaev that his boss had reached the limit of his reform capacity and was retreating, confused, before an onslaught of the reactionaries. He found it sad to see Gorbachev swaggering and acting superior. He and Alexander Yakovlev listened together on radio one day as Gorbachev made a “disastrous” speech to the Supreme Soviet. Yakovlev muttered in some distress, “He’s done for, now I’m sure of it.” Gorbachev, as Russian journalist Leonid Nikitinsky put it, had looked back at the Central Committee and turned into a pillar of salt.

The Soviet leader abruptly dissolved his presidential council, rather than heed its more progressive members. As a gesture to his old comrade, he kept Alexander Yakovlev on as a special adviser, though he cut him out of decision making. Kryuchkov and Boldin had partly succeeded in poisoning Gorbachev against Yakovlev. Together they came to Gorbachev’s office to warn the incredulous president that the former ambassador to Canada was in reality an agent of the CIA.

As he hardened his position, Gorbachev fired the progressive head of state television, Mikhail Nenashev, a protégé of Alexander Yakovlev, and put the more subservient director general of the official Soviet news agency TASS, Leonid Kravchenko, in charge. After four years of glasnost, television had become daring and hard-hitting, and Gorbachev now saw it as a threat to the system rather than an instrument of reform.

A charming hard-liner with a boyish face, Kravchenko told state television editorial staff, “I am the president’s man, and I have come to carry out the president’s will.” Gorbachev thereafter called Kravchenko several times a day to instruct him on what political material was suitable viewing for the masses. He ordered Kravchenko to exclude opposition voices, in particular Boris Yeltsin’s. Popular broadcaster Vladimir Pozner had to resign after earning Kravchenko’s disapproval for saying on the American TV program
The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers
that Yeltsin was more popular than Gorbachev.
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The next to go was fifty-two-year-old Vadim Bakatin, the respected police chief. An enlightened reformer and talented artist, Bakatin was dedicated to getting Soviet Interior Ministry police to obey the law rather than the party. He was detested by a bloc of communists calling themselves Soyuz (Union). Their leader, Viktor Alksnis, a colonel-deputy who strutted around in a black leather jacket even on hot days, had called for his sacking, claiming he was not tough enough on separatists. Gorbachev stunned his dwindling corps of reformers by meekly obeying. He replaced Bakatin on December 2 with Boris Pugo, a softspoken balding Latvian with tufts of hair sticking up on each side in clown-like fashion. As head of the KGB in Riga, Pugo had ruthlessly kept the lid on the Latvian independence movement.

The Congress of People’s Deputies started its fourth session on December 16, with Gorbachev a prisoner of its conservative majority. Another Soyuz leader, Colonel Nikolay Petrushenko, who resembled Sergeant Bilko from the CBS comedy series, boasted in the foyer that they would get rid of Shevardnadze next, because of his role in the loss of Eastern Europe. Deeply disillusioned with Gorbachev, Shevardnadze was already determined to quit.

The white-haired foreign minister shocked the deputies, and Gorbachev, by announcing from the podium that he was resigning his post. “Comrade democrats,” he said, “you have scattered. Reformers have taken to the hills. Dictatorship is on the offensive.” With that he walked from the hall.

The next day Gorbachev nominated the least effectual member of the Politburo, Gennady Yanayev, to the new post of vice president, in a further attempt to co-opt the conservatives. Standing at the rostrum with large bags under his eyes and an unconvincing hairpiece, Yanayev declared with all the sincerity of the privileged apparatchik, “I am a convinced communist to the depths of my soul.” Even the Congress majority did not want this hard-drinking, chain-smoking propagandist. They rejected him on the first ballot. Gorbachev angrily made his confirmation a vote of confidence and got his vice presidential nominee accepted on a second ballot.

Three weeks later, Gorbachev appointed another backstabber as prime minister. Valentin Pavlov, a rotund economist who liked loud silk ties and giggled a lot, concealed a hatred for Gorbachev, whom he regarded as a man with two faces. Gorbachev claimed later that he did not know that this crew-cut xenophobe, known contemptuously as “Porcupig,” was a drunkard and a diehard communist. Pavlov almost immediately outraged the population by withdrawing all large banknotes from circulation overnight, wiping out the savings of millions of people. He justified this by citing an outlandish conspiracy theory peddled by Kryuchkov, that private banks in Austria, Switzerland, and Canada planned to dump a large amount of money on the Soviet market with the goal of producing political instability.

Completing the group encircling Gorbachev was Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov. A corpulent and salty-tongued World War II veteran with florid complexion, hamlike hands, and a bent for English and Russian poetry, Field Marshal Yazov was a true communist who lived modestly and believed that private property was the root of all evil and that only incompetence and corruption had prevented the Soviet Union enjoying prosperity.

Everything was in place for what this motley and sinister assortment of hardliners wanted—a bloody crackdown on the independence movements that were fracturing the Soviet Union. The most assertive of these were in the Baltic republics, which had been annexed by Stalin half a century earlier and longed for their prewar freedoms. Gorbachev never understood Baltic nationalism. He used a chopping motion of his hand to express his contempt for the “secessionists and political adventurers” making trouble on the Soviet Union’s western flank.

Nine months before, after Sajudis, the anti-Moscow national front of Lithuania, won the state election, the country bordering Poland had become the first Soviet republic to declare independence. The Soviet emblem on the parliament building in the capital, Vilnius, had been chiseled off and replaced with a canvas depicting a knight with a sword in hand, the emblem of free Lithuania. The new government had taken over public buildings and dropped Russian as an official language.

The conservatives in Moscow were appalled. Gorbachev himself never intended that his changes should go so far. He warned the Lithuanian parliament to submit to Soviet power, and imposed an economic blockade. Troops staged provocative parades in Vilnius, and military helicopters dropped leaflets over the city, urging the Russian and Polish minorities to join pro-Soviet rallies. The intimidation had no effect.

On January 12, 1991, a shadowy pro-Soviet “committee for national salvation” announced in Vilnius that it was taking power. This committee “requested” Soviet forces to seize the television tower in Vilnius, which was broadcasting proindependence material. Unarmed Lithuanians had gathered outside the tower, fearing it would be taken over by pro-Moscow forces. In the early hours of January 13, troops from the KGB Alpha Group, trained especially to fight terrorists, arrived and fired live bullets into the crowd. Thirteen civilians were killed and several hundred injured. One KGB officer was accidentally shot dead by his own men. Gorbachev at first voiced support for the faceless committee of national salvation. He did not disown the KGB assault on the civilians at the TV tower but blamed everything on the Lithuanian declaration of independence, which he called “a virtual nighttime, constitutional coup.”

In Moscow glasnost was suspended, and news of the massacre was suppressed. Central television gave only the military version of events in Vilnius. The lively late-night program
Vzglyad
(Glance) was taken off the air, and an independent news agency, Interfax, was silenced. TASS described the nationalist defenders of the television tower as “intoxicated youths . . . singing pro-fascist songs.” It seemed as if the totalitarian past had returned.

Knowing that if sovereignty could be crushed in the Baltics it could be crushed in Russia too, Yeltsin acted quickly. He flew to Tallinn, capital of Estonia, the most northerly of the three Baltic republics, to meet the defiant elected presidents of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. There in the barricaded parliament, protected by Estonian youths with hunting guns, he signed an agreement with them to recognize each other’s sovereignty. Yeltsin’s prestige stiffened the nationalists’ resolve to resist, infuriating Gorbachev. A friendly KGB source advised Yeltsin not to take a flight back to Moscow, as it might be sabotaged. He was driven instead the 217 miles from Tallinn to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and from there flew back to the Russian capital.