Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (30 page)

As general secretary of the Communist Party from 1964 to 1982, Leonid Brezhnev was notorious for his love of expensive gifts and for his failure to investigate allegations of corruption against his most generous donors. After Brezhnev died in 1982, Gorbachev, by then a member of the Politburo, was instrumental in getting Medunov fired, along with corrupt USSR interior minister Nikolay Shchelokov. Gorbachev recalls for his companions that Shchelokov had given the orders to destroy him in retaliation. But it was the interior minister who was destroyed. Shortly after losing his post, Shchelokov was found dead, apparently of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

The Gorbachevs were, however, not above sending presents to Brezhnev themselves, according to Brezhnev’s daughter Galina. Two years earlier she told the Moscow television program
Vzglyad
that Raisa Gorbacheva gave expensive presents, including a necklace, to the Brezhnev family to win favor for her husband.
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The episode of the program containing Galina’s allegation was banned by Kremlin officials for “aesthetic reasons.” An alcoholic who would end up in a psychiatric hospital, Galina was a suspect witness and had political reasons for discrediting the Gorbachevs. Her husband, Yury Churbanov, was arrested for taking bribes and jailed for six years after a trial that was widely interpreted as a sign from Gorbachev that political corruption would not be tolerated.

As party boss Gorbachev also received gifts, such as the velvet dressing gowns and sable hats pressed on him years earlier by the then Kazakh first secretary Dinmukhamed Kunayev, a Brezhnev loyalist whom Gorbachev subsequently accused of corruption. Some of the most lavish gifts ended up on the third-floor warehouse informally known as Aladdin’s Cave in Old Square, where top party members were required to deposit expensive gifts, though few rarely did, according to Valery Boldin. Gorbachev’s betrayer would later make unverifiable claims in his memoirs about Gorbachev keeping for himself valuable gifts of gold, silver, and platinum.
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While Grachev knows there is no serious case for Gorbachev to answer about Stavropol, there is potential embarrassment in the populist charges that Yeltsin has constantly made against him, his love of luxury as head of a supposedly egalitarian society. Even the steadfast Shakhnazarov found grossly offensive the sumptuous holiday dacha that Gorbachev commanded to be built at Foros with state funds for his exclusive use.

They suspect, rightly, that this will diminish as a sensitive issue in direct proportion to Yeltsin’s embrace of the perquisites of power after Gorbachev is gone.

Gorbachev’s aides worry more about what might be found in the files and archives that will fall into the possession of the new authorities. In the last few days they have employed three people, listed in Chernyaev’s diary as Weber, Yermonsky, and Kuvaldin, to cart sacks of paper to rooms they have rented in Razin Street and sift through them for any time bombs. Fearful that they might be locked out of the Kremlin at any time, Gorbachev has had crates of Politburo documents transferred to General Staff headquarters, and Chernyaev has taken some sensitive documents home for safekeeping, despite Grachev’s warning that he shouldn’t “exclude the possibility of a search of your place when they come up with a suit against Gorbachev.” Chernyaev does not believe it will come to that, but he is worried that if things do not go well for Yeltsin, he will have to look for people to blame. “I will be the first candidate as a witness,” he notes in his diary. “However there is nothing criminal or compromising in my archives. But to find something against Mikhail Sergeyevich is possible, especially as he was so frank in personal conversations.”
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Gorbachev was made aware of this danger as far back as August 23, the day the apparatchiks were ordered out of the Central Committee building after the collapse of the coup. A distraught senior party official, Valentin Falin, had called Gorbachev to ask him if he was in agreement with the ban just imposed on the Communist Party. When he said he was, Falin had pointed out that the safes of the Central Committee contained documents that were extremely delicate and affected him. Gorbachev replied that he was in an awkward position and could do nothing.

One positive consequence of the fall of the USSR, however, is that there will no longer be any Soviet institutions to bring charges against Gorbachev for violating the Soviet constitution.

Other members of Gorbachev’s staff have different concerns about retribution from the new crowd preparing to take over the Kremlin. Pavel Palazchenko worries about a comment he made to Ted Koppel on camera. He told the ABC interviewer that while he might not characterize the seizure of power by Yeltsin today as a coup d’etat, it is nevertheless “something that’s being done by democratically elected people in a less than democratic and fair way.” When it was broadcast on ABC television, a friend said, “only half-jokingly and perhaps quite seriously,” that he should perhaps ask the Americans for some kind of protection from Yeltsin.

As the last Soviet president ruminates about his past, a convoy of six white vans rented from Intercar is racing towards the Kremlin accompanied by the sirens and flashing lights of a police escort.

Having finished their televised interview with Boris Yeltsin in the Russian White House, the CNN crew has to get across town and set up transmission equipment in a very short time to broadcast Gorbachev’s last public act as president of the collapsing superpower and to complete the second leg of their exclusive coverage of the two leaders.

Senior CNN producer Charlie Caudill recalled a chaotic scene after the Yeltsin interview. “We break down all the equipment, load it into six vans, in thirty minutes. This is rush hour. We have to give ‘donations’ to the police and get a full red light screaming escort through the streets of Moscow. Tom and I are in the lead car. People probably think we are Yeltsin and Gorbachev.”
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The interviewers, Steve Hurst and Claire Shipman, find themselves hustled into a police car that races along at the back of the convoy, its emergency lights flashing in the dark streets. “I never in my life thought that an American like me would be in a motorcade like that,” said Shipman, who has often seen official cars speeding down the “Zil lane” in the center of the highway that would “kill anyone who got in the way.”

The CNN cavalcade comes to a halt at the Borovitsky Gate of the Kremlin. Yeltsin’s new guards are unsure of their instructions and several times check by telephone with superior officers as the crew wait impatiently to be admitted. Eventually an official car appears to lead the line of vans into the Kremlin, past the Armory and the Great Kremlin Palace and across Kremlin Square to the Senate Building.

It is 5:35 p.m. before the army of technicians gets to the third-floor corridor. There they are directed to Room Number 4, where Gorbachev will make his address. This is a mock presidential office, furnished to look like the real office sixty feet away along the corridor, and used only for television interviews. It is sometimes called the “green room,” as its walls are sheathed in greenish oyster damask above burr-maple paneling.

CNN has an agreement with Gosteleradio that they will join forces to transmit the resignation address together live. The unique arrangement resulted from a meeting Tom Johnson and Stu Loory had with Gorbachev a few days back, when they presented him with the same CNN book on the coup that they had given Yeltsin. They proposed to the Soviet president that they would broadcast his resignation address live around the world and interview him immediately afterwards. Gorbachev had listened politely and asked Johnson about CNN’s global reach. He jokingly inquired if the network’s “empire is doing well now—it’s not being dismantled, is it?” “At the present time it is not, Mr. President,” replied Johnson. “Well, it means you have structured your empire quite well,” laughed Gorbachev, “but be sure to give enough power to your republics!” Knowing that their rivals from ABC had got a head start, they pleaded that while ABC’s American audience was much bigger, their audience levels spike incredibly for major news events. Yegor Yakovlev later called the CNN executives to say that Gorbachev had agreed to the live broadcast of his final address and an interview immediately afterwards.

Caudill is horrified to find Russian TV technicians have brought in three big cameras, “like in the 1950s,” to transmit the pictures to both the Russian and worldwide audiences. He needs higher quality pictures. “No way are we going to use these,” he says. His technicians set up a state-of-the-art camera to route the pictures to their truck, and from there to Russian TV and on to a CNN feed, “an incredibly difficult operation.” Caudill has the extra pressure of having the company’s president breathing down his neck. Johnson says to him as they work frantically, “Caudill, you know this is your ass!”

By ten minutes to seven the room has been transformed into a brightly lit television studio. There are three central television cameras, a CNN camera, and audio equipment to provide simultaneous translation. Of ABC there is no sign. The crew from Atlanta is unaware that Koppel and Kaplan are hanging out with Gorbachev in the president’s real office down the corridor, compiling material for their documentary on the final days.

Pavel Palazchenko finds the scene a little unreal. While the president is preparing to resign and hand over control of nuclear weapons to Boris Yeltsin, there are more Americans inside the Kremlin than Russians—television executives in tailored suits, interviewers with pancake makeup, producers, directors, editors, writers, photographers, camera crews, microphone holders, assistants with clipboards, engineers, and technicians, all milling around and giving instructions and checking wires and microphones. Gorbachev’s interpreter wonders as he listens to the medley of American accents, “Who could have thought that this—all of this—were possible just a year ago?”
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A few hundred yards away, in Red Square, scores of Muscovites have gathered, though they have little interest in witnessing history being made. They are shoppers crushing into the big GUM department store that takes up the side of the vast square opposite the Kremlin, to buy what they can before it closes. Word has got around that some scarce items have appeared on the shelves. They form jostling lines to snap up whatever items of use they can find.

They ignore much of the tawdry goods on display, especially a pile of plastic passport covers. They are stamped “USSR.” Only tourists will buy these in the future.

CHAPTER 19

THINGS FALL APART

After the fearful days of August 1991, when it seemed, however briefly, that totalitarianism would return to the Soviet Union, the leaders of the constituent republics one by one announced their intention to form independent states. On Saturday, August 24, even Ukraine declared it would seek independence.

Yeltsin was taken aback. Sovereignty within a new union was one thing. But even he found it difficult to contemplate the outright defection from the Soviet Union of the fifty-two million people in Ukraine whose fate had been linked with Russia’s for centuries.

Nevertheless, the Russian president formally recognized the independence of the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which had always been somewhat semidetached members of the Soviet Union. Foreign countries followed suit, no longer wary of offending Gorbachev. But both Yeltsin and Gorbachev faced a dilemma. If the rest of the USSR was disintegrating, what should take its place?

The first initiative to resolve the crisis came in late August. Yeltsin’s secretary of state, Gennady Burbulis, called the Kremlin and suggested to Gorbachev’s adviser Georgy Shakhnazarov that they should meet in the White House and work on new ideas for the future of the Soviet landmass.
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A political scientist with bald head and thick black eyebrows, Shakhnazarov doubled as a poet and writer of science fiction under the name Georgy Shakh. But many of his original compositions these days were political memos that he delivered to Gorbachev, always urging him towards ever more daring democratic reforms.

Burbulis was an abrasive former professor of Marxist philosophy from Sverdlovsk. He had the zeal of the converted, having evolved in a short time from communist ideologue to ruthless anticommunist. His evolution was so dramatic that on a television quiz show, contestants who listened to a recording of one of his delirious homages to Leninism thought it was the old Stalin-era apologist Mikhail Suslov. With gaunt face and high-pitched voice, Burbulis was known as Yeltsin’s “grey cardinal,” though he had distinctly worldly tastes. He was the first of the Russian government officials to order himself a Zil after the coup, and Yeltsin observed how thrilled he was when the escort car raced ahead of his new limousine, its light blinking and sirens screeching.

The main difference between Shakhnazarov and Burbulis was that the former wanted to maintain the Soviet Union and the latter wanted to destroy it.

Gorbachev’s adviser consented to go to the White House, “though you would think that as I held higher rank as aide to the president of the Soviet Union he would come to my office.” Giving in on this small detail, he realized, symbolized the shift in power.

When he arrived, accompanied by Gorbachev’s legal adviser, Yury Baturin, they were made to wait half an hour in an anteroom. More small humiliations followed during the daylong negotiations in Burbulis’s cavernous office. Several times Yeltsin’s secretary of state went off to chat with his aides, and twice he went to a separate table to conduct business with other visitors. Shakhnazarov concluded that he wanted them to know they were not top priority.

The sticking point was whether there would be a single union state with some devolved sovereignty, as Gorbachev wanted, or a less centralized union of states, as the Russians insisted. If the latter idea prevailed, then the USSR was indeed finished. Burbulis made it clear that he envisaged Russia going it alone in the world. But when Shakhnazarov asked him if he were prepared to allow an independent Ukraine to keep the Crimea, Yeltsin’s adviser replied, “Absolutely not!” The Russian-populated peninsula in the Black Sea had been ceded from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 by Khrushchev at a time when the Soviet Union was regarded as a permanent entity and it didn’t matter much. Now it did.