Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (45 page)

Ukraine’s position on the Soviet military units on its territory was conveyed to Moscow that day in the form of an interview given by Leonid Kravchuk to
Izvestia.
The Ukrainian president reassures Russia that he does not object to Yeltsin being supreme commander in chief of the strategic forces on his territory, but with the mandatory condition that strategic missiles and tactical nuclear weapons be removed from operational status. “That is, we will have nuclear weapons, but it will be impossible to launch them. In that case the world will know that Ukraine is not responsible for any misfortune, God forbid.”

With respect to conventional forces, Kravchuk promises that Russian officers will not be expelled, and they will not invite Ukrainian officers serving in the Soviet Army elsewhere to come and serve in Ukraine. “If we went ahead with that, we would have to provide for their return and, consequently, expel people who are living here now. That would involve a great resettlement of peoples and would lead to confrontation.... The quick return of Ukrainians to Ukraine would be unrealistic and would create turmoil in the minds of the 11.5 million Russians living there.”

As for Gorbachev’s recent and frequent complaints that Russians are now finding themselves in foreign countries, Kravchuk comments bitterly that there are many Ukrainians living in Russia, but there is not a single Ukrainian school nor a single newspaper in Ukrainian in Russia, whereas half of all Ukrainian children are taught in Russian-speaking schools in Ukraine.

Shaposhnikov leaves the Kremlin as midnight approaches, relieved at the way things have turned out. Ambassadors and correspondents had been plaguing him with questions about who had political control over the nuclear weapons. As he walks to his limousine, a Russian journalist calls out, “In whose hands is the nuclear button?” “In safe hands,” he replies, with a smile.

In the Penta Hotel across town, CNN executives celebrate their journalistic coup late into the night. The Americans are cock-a-hoop. For the highly combative Johnson, it is “an incredible moment in the lives of all of us.” In the early hours Stu Loory leaves for the Rossiya, the monstrous concrete hotel adjacent to Red Square, where there is a studio with satellite uplink to Los Angeles, so he can appear on CNN’s
Larry King Live.
He holds up the Mont Blanc pen for American viewers to see as he tells the story of how it was used to liquidate the Soviet Union. Next morning at breakfast Johnson asks for it back. Loory takes the pen out of his pocket and hands it over. “You only think it’s yours!” he says with a straight face.
¹²

The CNN celebrations are interrupted by a call to CNN manager Frida Ghitis from Georgia, where civil war is in full swing.
¹³
President Zviad Gamsakhurdia is under attack from armed opposition forces in Tbilisi. Christiane Amanpour and Siobhan Darrow and camerawoman Jane Evans have braved gunfire to get to Gamsakhurdia’s dugout in the parliament and have interviewed him under fire.

“It was a crackling call over a satellite phone telling us the interview with the Georgian leader in his bunker was ready,” said Ghitis. “All we had to do now was get the tape back to Moscow so we could show it to the world.”

This would be another global exclusive. As flights in and out of Tbilisi are not operating, a CNN producer in Moscow calls a pilot contact in the Russian air force to make the two-and-a-half-hour flight to Tbilisi and return with the tape immediately. The pilot, a small man in a large fur hat, says he will do it for $10,000 cash. Tom Johnson gives him $5,000 and promises the other half when he returns. The pilot does not show up again for twenty-four hours, by which time BBC has broadcast its own interview with Gamsakhurdia and the CNN Moscow office has broadcast a copy of Amanpour’s interview acquired from a courier who came on a regular flight from another airport in Georgia. When the tardy pilot at last arrives, he demands the other $5,000. CNN staff at first decline, but as he is accompanied by two large, menacing bodyguards, they come to the conclusion it might be unwise to refuse. According to Ghitis, “We paid the money, received the tape, and put it in the trash. The new Russian capitalism was making its way into the old Soviet Union.”

CHAPTER 27

DECEMBER 26: THE DAY AFTER

The morning of December 26, 1991, is sunny but much colder. The temperature has dropped to 22 degrees Fahrenheit, and icicles have formed beneath the snowcovered roof of the presidential dacha. Gorbachev wakes to find that the Zil limousine is no longer waiting for him in the driveway. Another Yeltsin promise—that he can retain his presidential transport until December 29—has not been kept. With some difficulty Gorbachev’s guards manage to get a spare Zil that, as Chernyaev notes acidly, is “kindly” provided by Yeltsin, so that Gorbachev can return to the Kremlin, where he also has three days’ grace, or so he believes, to clear out his desk and keep last-minute appointments.

The new ruler is making Gorbachev aware of his dependency on the Russian presidential whim. Yeltsin has ordered his security chief, Korzhakov, to single out Gorbachev’s guards and drivers for harassment to make the family leave the dacha as quickly as possible. His rationale, he claims later, is that as sole president he must commandeer the presidential residence right away, no matter what he promised. Barvikha-4 has a military command post and all the communications for the country’s top leader. The supreme commander of the country’s military forces cannot be somewhere without facilities for the nuclear button and the accompanying colonels.

Notwithstanding his new civilian status, Gorbachev is still conveyed at a terrific pace along the reserved center lane of Kutuzovsky Prospekt in the borrowed Zil, with police cars before and behind. When he arrives in the Kremlin, where the Russian flag is fluttering over the Senate cupola, he finds that the attitude of the Kremlin guards, normally deferential, has become distinctly surly. When Andrey Grachev and Anatoly Chernyaev turn up to help Gorbachev with his final duties, they too are made aware that the security people and ancillary staff are under new orders. Grachev observes how they are rudely and deliberately making Gorbachev aware of the change in his status.

The loyal aides are struck by how drawn and out of sorts Gorbachev looks. He is hung over and fighting the aches and discomfort that accompany a bout of flu. Aside from the crushing blow of being forced out of office, he has to concern himself with the emotional turmoil affecting Raisa and the physical disruption in their personal life. He broods about the way he is being kicked out of office as “most uncivilized, in the worst inherited Soviet traditions.”

“They are throwing me out of the dacha, and they are taking the car away,” Gorbachev complains angrily as he enters his office, where a brass plaque on the door still proclaims, “M. S. Gorbachev, President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” and the red flag remains in place behind his desk.

Chernyaev again wonders why Gorbachev still wants to use the presidential office in the Kremlin. It is a temptation for his foes to treat him with disrespect. But he finds it difficult to contradict Gorbachev at such a sensitive time. “He is stubborn and I’m not comfortable to be sharp with him while arguing. He might think that I am being too cheeky, now that he is not a president anymore.”

Gorbachev’s farewell address came too late for the deadlines of the Russian morning dailies, leading Chernyaev to conclude that “not a single newspaper carried the full text of the appeal as everybody is afraid of Yeltsin.” Much of the coverage is critical of the outgoing
president. Rossiyskaya Gazeta,
the organ of the Russian parliament (which next day does carry the full text), prints a page 1 commentary headlined: “The West Believes Gorbachev; The Russians Believe Yeltsin.” The paper’s senior columnist Vladimir Kuznechevsky accuses the United States of wanting to keep the Soviet Union intact and Gorbachev as leader. “Gorbachev showed convincingly he was at one with major international leaders. With Yeltsin it is a completely different story. He has no interests apart from the interests of Russia, and is satisfying those interests by integrating Russia into the general historical stream.” The paper cites a poll showing that 63 percent of Russians are happy to see Gorbachev leave office, and 66 percent are convinced that the Union will be maintained in some form under the commonwealth.

More worrying for Gorbachev and his aides, who are concerned that there will be attempts to discredit them, another commentator in the same daily, Gennady Melkov, calls for an open trial of the main leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Under the headline “Ghost of Nuremberg” he points out that not every German was guilty of crimes under Nazism but that the leadership should take moral responsibility for what they had done. Fifty million people died during the history of the Communist Party, he writes, and no other party in the world killed so many of its own people.

The negative coverage rankles with Gorbachev’s accomplices. Alexander Yakovlev tells a reporter, “I’m really hurt by the ingratitude towards Gorbachev which many people are falling over themselves to express.”

Several newspapers do, however, express sympathy and appreciation for the fallen president.
Izvestia,
the former mouthpiece of the Soviet government, is indignant at the manner in which Gorbachev has been dumped, declaring on its front page, “He left his high position looking at us directly and frankly in the eyes. He did all he could.” The paper’s columnist Gayaz Alimov criticizes the absence of a proper farewell ceremony. “This is a question of our own dignity as a nation, as a people, and of the honor of the current political leaders. We will be ashamed of this some time later; even now some of us already feel bad about it.” A colleague, Inna Muravyeva, points out that Gorbachev freed the press, removed fear, and “opened the valve” of their self-respect. “He bequeathed to Russia inflation, beggars in the street, millionaires, and 80 percent of people living on the poverty line, but also Andrey Sakharov and the realization of the value of a person as a proud human being.”

Vitaly Korotich, editor of
Ogonyok,
muses that “Gorbachev took this country like my wife takes cabbage. He thought that to get rid of the dirt, he could just peel off the top layer of leaves. But he had to keep going until there was nothing left.”

Komsomolskaya Pravda,
the radical youth newspaper, acknowledges that while Gorbachev was unable to change the living standards of the people, he changed the people. “He didn’t know how to make sausage, but he did know how to give freedom. And if someone believes that the former is more important than the latter, he is likely never to have either.”

“Finita la commedia!”
declares
Pravda,
which was shut down after the August coup but has been relaunched by a team of pro-communist journalists and taken over by a family of Greek entrepreneurs, the Yannikoses. The former organ of the Communist Party, with its trademark masthead of Order of Lenin medals, is daily harassed by Yeltsin’s officials. A few days back, its electricity supply was cut off, its telephones were disconnected, and militiamen loyal to the Russian Federation sealed off the editorial offices on the tenth floor of its office building. Nevertheless,
Pravda’s
editor in chief, Alexander Ilyin, manages to produce the paper every day. He cautions against the temptation to gloat over Gorbachev’s dismissal, saying, “This is not the time to throw stones at the back of the person who is leaving.”

The retrograde communist newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya declares a plague on both houses. It publishes a cartoon on its front page showing Gorbachev and Yeltsin standing over a pile of smoldering ashes with Gorbachev saying, “Now I think we can say that perestroika has been completed.”

As Gorbachev deals with his morning correspondence, the Italian journalist Giulietto Chiesa arrives in the Kremlin with colleague Enrico Singer for the first scheduled interview with Gorbachev as a “simple citizen.” The reporters for
La Stampa
and
La Repubblica
find the atmosphere strange. “Everything was in disarray, everyone was abandoning their position, and Yeltsin’s men were already there, waiting with impatience,” recalled Chiesa.
¹
They note that a red flag is still proudly displayed on a pole behind Gorbachev’s desk, as if the Soviet Union still exists and he is still president. Gorbachev greets the Italians with his usual elegance, but Chiesa perceives his sense of loss.

The former Soviet leader amuses his guests with a story of how, when he vacationed in Sicily with Raisa Maximovna early in his career, he had to show his fist to a French tourist who was coming on too strong to his young wife. “Perhaps he wasn’t French but Italian, and Gorbachev simply wants to be courteous to us,” thinks Chiesa. Gorbachev allows some of his bitterness to show when he talks to them about the way the Union was dismantled. He calls the end of the USSR a putsch and the press conference of the regional presidents after their Alma-Ata summit a cock fight.

“I myself changed as the country did, but I also changed the country,” he boasts. “After all, it’s a rare opportunity to help restore one’s homeland to the world community, to universal values. That’s why I feel that whatever happens, my destiny has been fulfilled.”

When the Italians ask how his family feels about his resignation, he replies tellingly, “I am grateful to my family for having endured all this.” The change in his living conditions doesn’t scare him, he says, referring to his move from a grand state dacha to a slightly less grand one, for use during his lifetime, with state-supplied cars, drivers, security, and servants. “My family and I are not spoiled people.”

And how did he feel seeing the red flag being lowered prematurely from the Kremlin? “The same as all citizens of this country,” he replies. “The red flag is our life. But I don’t want to dramatize this moment out of respect to my compatriots.”