Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (47 page)

The limousine cuts across the ring road, cruises along Tverskaya Street, and turns right past the Intourist Hotel, then left in through the Borovitsky Gate of the Kremlin, finally stopping at the Senate Building. He is joined there by his deputy prime minister, Gennady Burbulis, parliament chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, and his minister for press and information, Mikhail Poltoranin.

The four men crowd into the lift and take it to the third floor. Guards snap to attention as they stride purposefully along the red runner in the corridor and burst into the anteroom of the presidential office to confront the receptionist on duty.

Mikhail Gorbachev has not yet arrived. He has an appointment at 11 a.m. in the presidential office with a group of journalists from the Japanese newspaper
Yomiuri Shimbun.
Under the deal worked out with Yeltsin in the Walnut Room, he believes he has the use of the office until Sunday. An unpleasant surprise awaits Gorbachev, however. In the early hours of the morning, on Yeltsin’s personal instructions, a group of workmen came with a bag of tools and unscrewed the plaque on the door of the office with the inscription in brass letters: “M. S. Gorbachev, President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” They replaced it with one stating, “B. N. Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation.” Gorbachev is no longer welcome.

“Well, show us around!” Yeltsin commands the receptionist.
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Without waiting for a response, he barges into the room. “Here on the table there was a marble pen set,” he thunders. “Where is it?” He clearly is implying that the property of the Kremlin is being pilfered by the outgoing officials. The secretary protests, “There was no set.... Mikhail Sergeyevich did not use such pens. We bought for him felt pens.”

“OK and what’s here?” demands Yeltsin, peering into the resting room where Gorbachev takes his afternoon naps and seeing only the couch and toilet facilities. The Russian president goes behind the office desk and starts pulling out drawers. He comes upon one that will not open.

“Why is it locked?” he booms. “Call the commanding officer.” An aide arrives with a key and opens the drawer. It is empty.

After nosing around some more, Yeltsin summons Kremlin staff and orders them to dump Gorbachev’s remaining private belongings in the corridor. The group then gathers around the oval table in the office. “OK! Give us glasses,” calls out Yeltsin. A bottle is produced and whiskey splashed into the tumblers, which are raised in a triumphal toast.

The secretary in the reception room nervously telephones Gorbachev and tells him what is happening: Yeltsin, Poltoranin, and Burbulis have occupied the office and are holding a party there, emptying a bottle of whiskey, the assistant says. And his name is no longer on the door.

After an hour and a half of revelry, Yeltsin announces benevolently to the trembling receptionist that he has no need to inspect the Walnut Room or the State Council office. He has seen them before. He and his companions leave, laughing among themselves. “Behave yourself!” he calls over his shoulder. “I’m going to come back today!”

Georgy Shakhnazarov arrives minutes later to check that the office is ready for Gorbachev’s interview with the Japanese correspondents. “I found that all the president’s things were taken out of the office and there was an order that by ten o’clock in the morning the office was to be ready for the arrival of the new master.”

Anatoly Chernyaev is horrified. “What a nightmare! And Yeltsin gets more and more uncouth. He is trampling on everything.... He must be paying us back for yesterday’s reception with the press!” He once again feels utterly dismayed that his boss would still want to come to the presidential office at all. “Why should he humiliate himself? Why does he have to go to the Kremlin? The flag has already been brought down over the cupola . . . and he is already not a president.”
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Gorbachev is in a fury when he arrives shortly after Yeltsin has left. On December 18 Yeltsin had publicly announced that Gorbachev could wait until the end of December or, at a maximum, until the middle of January to make a decision on his resignation. When he did decide to resign on December 25, Yeltsin had clearly and categorically agreed that he could remain in his office until December 29 to wind up his affairs.

“Yeltsin put off his presidential duties to supervise personally my ‘expulsion’ from the Kremlin,” complained Gorbachev in his memoirs. “I was informed that Yeltsin, Khasbulatov and Burbulis had occupied my office at 8:30 a.m. and held a party there, emptying a bottle of whiskey . . . for their ‘victory.’ This was the triumph of plunderers, I can find no other word for it.”
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The Russian president has had for some time the use of an office in the adjacent Kremlin building. But Gorbachev’s continued presence in the historic seat of power, two days after he stepped down, is a manifestation that a single all-union state still exists. It is an affront to the new ruler. Yeltsin is the sole president of Russia, but it is Gorbachev who is being fêted by the foreign media and who still claims the right to occupy the presidential office in the Kremlin, with the red flag of the Soviet Union behind his desk.

Grachev reckons that the door plaque and the red flag are not merely symbols for Yeltsin but the very goals of the struggle, the chief trophies of his crusade against Gorbachev.

Yeltsin does not like the “rumors” that appear later in the press that they literally threw Gorbachev’s things out of the Kremlin office. He makes some backhand charges of his own. “The old tenants did not unscrew the handles from the doors, of course. But they did remove some furniture and even took some official state gold fountain pens from their inkwells. Well, that kind of thing’s a habit in our country.” He denies acting imperiously and blames “friction among the clerks.” He claims that they warned Gorbachev and his staff a week before the move of their intentions. “It was a period of time quite sufficient to pack up one’s papers. From the outset I did not want Gorbachev and his team, or rather its remnants, either to be thrown out of the Kremlin or allowed to linger an extra month packing. Long farewells make for too many tears.”
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The idea of moving into Gorbachev’s office crystallized in Yeltsin’s mind only in the previous few weeks, when it became evident that the Soviet Union had no future. Before that, when there was a chance that some form of union would be salvaged, there was no discussion of Gorbachev leaving the Kremlin, as he would have continued to command the center from there, however weakened.

Up to then Yeltsin also gave the impression to his family that he would rule Russia from the White House. Since being elected Russian president in June, he has made minimal use of his Kremlin office, going there mainly for formal purposes. His daughter, Tanya, said a few weeks ago, “The White House is his real office; the Kremlin office is just for show—to receive foreign guests and hold other official ceremonies.”
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Yeltsin is aware that to rule from the Kremlin will give the world reason to suspect his “great power” ambitions and that many of his colleagues will question whether a democratically elected leader should occupy the centuries-old citadel of imperial and totalitarian rule. Some regard the White House, the scene of Yeltsin’s heroic stand in August, to be the state symbol of Russia, rather than the fortress of the tsars on Red Square.

The Russian president has no patience, however, for suggestions that the Kremlin should be turned into a museum of history and culture after the departure of the last Soviet ruler. The Kremlin is an artistic gem, he acknowledges, but it is also the most important government compound in Russia. “The country’s entire defense system is hooked up to the Kremlin, the surveillance system, all the coded messages from all over the world are sent here, and there is a security apparatus for the buildings, developed down to the tiniest detail.” The Kremlin is, moreover, the symbol of “stability, duration and determination in the political line to be followed.”

It also was Gorbachev’s bailiwick, and it is now his for the taking.

One drawback for Yeltsin is that by moving to the Kremlin and bequeathing the White House as a kind of independent territory to the elected deputies, he is exacerbating the division between parliament and presidential rule and has left the White House with its squabbling parliamentarians to become a staging post for a future revolt against him.

Unable to use the ransacked presidential office on the third floor, Gorbachev descends to the second floor and proceeds to the office of the head of his apparatus, Grigory Revenko, to keep his appointment with the Japanese journalists.

He tells them, “You know what, I consider I have fulfilled my task.” He points out that the totalitarian system is no more and society has been transformed. “The main thing is that the people have changed. Now that they have tasted freedom I hope nothing will force them back to the status of before.”
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Another Japanese media company makes contact with his staff to offer $1 million for a televised interview in the Kremlin the next day.
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Gorbachev at first says he will accept but is talked out of it by Chernyaev, who points out that it is shameful to come back to the Kremlin where Yeltsin is having fun, and it would be more shameful to be looking for somewhere else to do the interview. Revenko scolds Chernyaev for turning down such an offer, but Gorbachev tells Chernyaev he has the flu and is not really feeling up to it. There will be many more lucrative media opportunities in the future.

Gorbachev leaves the Senate Building at midday, ducks into his borrowed Zil, and departs from the Kremlin through the Borovitsky Gate, never to return so long as Boris Yeltsin is president of Russia.

Early in the afternoon Yeltsin comes back to the Senate Building to occupy what is now his office, this time accompanied by a Russian camera crew. He instructs them to film his first act as master of the Kremlin. This is the signing of a decree providing for Russian jurisdiction over the Soviet Union State Television and Radio Company, Gosteleradio. Sitting at the desk vacated by Gorbachev, the Russian president puts his signature to an order transforming Soviet television into the Ostankino Russian State Television and Radio Company. He also decrees that Yegor Yakovlev should supervise the changeover and remain at its head, prompting a tongue-in-cheek headline in
Izvestia:
“Yegor Yakovlev Is Ordered to Turn Over All-Union Television and Radio Company to Yegor Yakovlev.”
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The state broadcasting station that smeared him when he led the opposition to Gorbachev, and that tried to gag him nine months ago, is at last fully under Yeltsin’s control. Yakovlev announces an increased output of news, with a new current affairs program called
Itogi
(Wrap-up) to be hosted by popular broadcaster Yevgeny Kiselyov. As his administration still controls the second national channel, the Russian president commands both TV channels beamed out to the Russian public—though he mandates Ostankino to shed its dependency on the state within a year and become independent through the issue of shares.

Yeltsin starts his reign as absolute leader in a flurry of activity. After dealing with the future of television he issues an order stripping his rebellious vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, of control over five state committees he had been chairing. He signs a decree for the privatization in the coming weeks of stores, restaurants, workshops, vodka distilleries, pharmaceutical plants, and baby food factories. Banks, railways, and airlines will come later. Collective farms must transfer land to their members and end the state monopoly on 637 million acres of territory. The decree repeals a 1918 Bolshevik ruling that all private ownership of land, mines, waters, forests, and natural resources “is abolished forever.”

While the increasingly conservative Russian parliament cannot do anything to stop Yeltsin issuing decrees, it can thwart the new ruler in other ways. That afternoon it turns down an application from prosecutor Valentin Stepankov for the arrest of General Vladislav Achalov, the deputy minister of defense at the time of the August coup, on a charge that he was actively involved. Among many deputies, outrage against the coup plotters is giving way to sympathy for their motives. Thirteen conspirators arrested in August remain in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison awaiting trial, but their conditions have been improved.

Coincidentally, on this day Valery Boldin is released from jail because of deteriorating health. In his four months in captivity for his part in the coup, Gorbachev’s fifty-six-year-old ex-chief of staff has lost none of his contempt for his former master. He is adamant that the junta sought nothing but prosperity and peace for the country, with no desire for power, and that the coup failed because they were too scrupulous and decent to use harsh methods. To Boldin its defeat was not a victory for the United States, as many are saying, but a rout of the disorganized units of a great power by its internal opponents.

Meanwhile, some one hundred presidents of large American companies arrive in Moscow for a Kremlin meeting on stimulating trade. They were invited by the Soviet government which no longer exists. The meeting goes ahead, with Yeltsin’s people, two days later, to the relief of the somewhat bewildered executives.

With the end of the Soviet Union, the editors of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
at the University of Chicago move the hands of the Doomsday Clock back to seventeen minutes before midnight. Six years before, when Gorbachev took office, the big hand stood at three minutes to Armageddon. (In January 2010, with new tensions among the world’s nuclear nations and in light of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the hands are moved forward again to six minutes to midnight.)

Freed from presidential responsibilities, Mikhail Gorbachev helps Raisa in the evening to put their new homes in order. “We were forced to move to different lodgings within twenty-four hours,” complained Gorbachev bitterly.
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Yeltsin’s security men left all their personal belongings strewn around. These have to be gathered up and packed. For both of them it is a humiliating intrusion on their domestic privacy. Raisa is intensely private and has always been determined to keep personal affairs away from the prying eyes of strangers. One day not long after returning from Foros, Gorbachev came home to find her in tears. She was destroying a bundle of fifty-two letters that the young Gorbachev had written to her when on business trips and that she had kept carefully all her life. She was terrified of another coup and couldn’t bear someone reading them. “She said, ‘We can’t have other people poking their noses into our life,’ and she threw the letters into the fire,” related Gorbachev years later. “She was crying and throwing them in the fire.... I burned twenty-five of my notebooks. Not my personal diaries but my working notes, with all the nuances, characteristics and plans. I burned them thinking I was somehow helping her by doing this.”
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