Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (49 page)

Throughout his retirement Gorbachev consistently argues that the end of the Cold War is not a victory for any one side, as all humankind emerged victorious. The threat of a nuclear holocaust became history, many European nations were given freedom of choice, and the security of Russia was strengthened by the development of more normal international relations. The Western conservative ideologists who claim victory are “simply puffed up with braggadocio.”

In later years the former Soviet leader becomes further disillusioned by NATO’s expansion to Russian borders, and he takes every opportunity to remind Western politicians that, during the negotiations on the unification of Germany, James Baker, Helmut Kohl, Douglas Hurd, and François Mitterrand all gave assurances that NATO would not expand to the East. They had agreed when Eduard Shevardnadze insisted during negotiation on Germany’s future, “Membership of a united Germany in NATO is unacceptable to us.”
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No longer an insurgent fighting for recognition or a pretender fearful of snubs, Yeltsin bombards Western capitals with messages of goodwill and camaraderie. He makes his international debut as undisputed Russian leader in February, flying to London for lunch with Prime Minister John Major. For years afterwards Major enjoys telling of an exchange that showed Yeltsin’s deadpan sense of humor. “I said to him, ‘Boris, tell me in one word: What is the state of Russia?’ He said, ‘Good.’ I was surprised—it was falling to pieces at the time. I said, ‘Tell me in two words.’ He said, ‘Not good.’”

From London, Yeltsin flies on to New York to take formal possession of the Soviet Union’s old seat on the United Nations Security Council. He proceeds next day to Camp David for talks with his new best friend, George Bush. He assures the U.S. president that only he and Marshal Shaposhnikov hold nuclear suitcases and that the control of nuclear weapons has passed into secure hands. Bush gives him a ride in a golf cart and presents him with a pair of hand-stitched cowboy boots with silver engraving for his sixty-first birthday. Yeltsin is so taken with the golf cart that he orders some for his grandchildren to drive around the garden of the presidential dacha in Moscow.

In May, accompanied by Raisa, their daughter, Irina, and interpreter Pavel Palazchenko, Gorbachev also travels to the United States, on a trip cohosted by Ronald Reagan and George Shultz and organized by his American admirer Jim Garrison, and is once more able to drink in the intoxicating brew of celebrity adulation and peer worship so lacking at home.
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The wealthy publisher Malcolm Forbes Jr. puts his private jet, named
Capitalist Tool,
at Gorbachev’s disposal to fly the party around eleven American cities, where they are accommodated in five-star hotels and greeted by fawning hosts, among them Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, and David Rockefeller. Twenty thousand people come to hear Gorbachev speak in Fulton, Missouri, the location of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech. In the New York Stock Exchange the former communist leader is cheered by traders as he declares that “anybody who comes to the Russian market will have the opportunity to extract enormous profits.”

President Bush plans a black-tie dinner for Gorbachev with a triple-A guest list. Word gets back to Yeltsin, and he sends Russian ambassador Vladimir Lukin to the White House to make clear that this will be seen as a personal affront by the Russian president. Bush scraps the formal event in the East Room and instead spirits the Gorbachev party upstairs through the back entrance for a private dinner with the Bush family and James and Susan Baker. Gorbachev doesn’t disappoint with his charm and self-appreciation. “A class act, that guy,” the U.S. president enthuses to Baker after they leave. Gorbachev angers Yeltsin on his return to Moscow by claiming credit for U.S. financial aid that Yeltsin hoped to nail down on a state visit to the United States the following month.

The Russian media largely ignores Gorbachev’s American odyssey. Instead they give blanket coverage to the second visit of President Yeltsin to the United States shortly afterwards. Yeltsin once disapproved of a Russian leader taking a spouse on a foreign trip, but this notion is consigned to a bygone era. He takes Naina with him. Yeltsin earns a tumultuous reception for an address to the Joint Houses of Congress in which he clears the way for American companies to do business in Russia. He concludes his speech on Capitol Hill with the words “Today free and democratic Russia is extending the hand of friendship to the American people.”

Yeltsin’s entourage is delighted with the newfound enthusiasm for him in the U.S. media. His officials note with glee the comment of Michael Wines in the
New York Times
that Yeltsin had at last “escaped the long shadow of Mr. Gorbachev, a man who had mesmerized average Americans and their Presidents alike with his flirtations with democratic rule and his frantic dance atop the Soviet power pyramid.”
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Five months after the transition, relations between the unforgiving Gorbachev and the belligerent Yeltsin deteriorate sharply. The former Soviet president starts to publicly criticize the harsh impact of shock therapy, which had sent prices skyrocketing and made people’s hard-earned savings worthless. Yeltsin complains that this breaks a pledge not to interfere in politics. Gorbachev explodes to a reporter from
Komsomolskaya Pravda.
“Listen, Yeltsin is not Jesus Christ. He is not the kind of a person to whom I should answer. Both the right wing and the democratic press have been simply falling on Gorbachev, trying to discredit me, to cause hate and venom.” In any event, he adds, he only promised not to turn his foundation into a political party.

Yeltsin accused Gorbachev of making dangerous and intolerant statements “in a schoolmasterly tone.” In true Soviet style he gets interior minister Viktor Verin to carry out an unannounced financial audit of the Gorbachev Foundation. To no one’s surprise, the auditors find “abuses” in foreign operations. Yeltsin’s media allies give Gorbachev the same kind of damaging treatment Yeltsin received from
Pravda
when it was under Communist Party control.
Izvestia,
for example, reports that Gorbachev is buying a house in Florida for $108,350, though no real estate transaction is ever identified.

Around this time Alexander Yakovlev, installed as vice president of the foundation, warns Gorbachev that some individuals have formed a task force to discredit him. Gorbachev tells La
Stampa’s
correspondent Elzio Mauro, “Now I see these names coming out in the open to attack me, one after the other. They probably want me to leave the country, to go hide somewhere, because I’m a problem to them.” Particularly hurtful is an accusation by Anatoly Lukyanov, former speaker of the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies who is awaiting trial in Matrosskaya Tishina prison as a putschist, that Gorbachev was complicit in the 1991 August coup.

The Commonwealth of Independent States never amounts to much, as its founders always intended. All the republics create their own armies and currencies. Only Belarus shows any enthusiasm for reintegrating with Russia. In Kiev, President Kravchuk cruelly dismisses a proposal by Gorbachev for greater commonwealth unity, saying, “That is the misfortune of that man, his sickness. Everybody is laughing at him, and he does not understand that.”

The Russian Constitutional Court summons Gorbachev to give evidence to a tribunal on the activities of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Labeling this “bizarre trial” a device for settling political scores, Gorbachev blusters that he will not take part in the proceedings even if hauled into court in handcuffs. The court fines him the maximum 100 rubles, about 5 U.S. dollars, but takes away his foreign passport. It is returned shortly afterwards when former West German chancellor Willy Brandt dies and Gorbachev wishes to attend the funeral.

Yeltsin’s impatience with Gorbachev comes to the breaking point in the autumn, when Gorbachev again strongly attacks his “cavalry charge” approach to the economy. On October 8, 1992, three busloads of police arrive and block the doors of Gorbachev’s foundation on Leningradsky Prospekt, preventing the staff from entering. Gorbachev turns up minutes later and fumes to journalists on the steps, “They are out to get Gorbachev, Gorbachev the devil, Gorbachev the prince of darkness, as they call me.” Yeltsin has issued a decree transferring the ownership of the building to the Russian Academy of Finance. The Gorbachev Foundation is allowed to remain but only as tenants paying rent and service charges to the Russian Academy of Finance. Gorbachev complains that all this is done in a typical Yeltsin fashion—“noisily, rudely, and unskillfully”—in order to humiliate him once more and clip his wings.

The Russian president also withdraws from Gorbachev the two Zil limousines and the unit of bodyguards that was part of the resignation deal. The former president has to settle for a standard black Volga V8 sedan.

Gorbachev’s relationship with Alexander Yakovlev breaks down after Yakovlev receives a telephone call from Yeltsin to tell him that the “Stalin Archives” that Gorbachev handed over just before his resignation have yielded up the original of the secret protocols to the notorious 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Europe between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany before World War II. The file contains maps six feet wide signed by Stalin in red and Ribbentrop in blue. Yakovlev has long sought the original documents for his research on Bolshevik crimes, but Gorbachev had assured him they were destroyed in 1950. “Finally, I always believed they would be found,” Yakovlev exclaims. Initials on the file indicate that Gorbachev knew they existed.
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This is backed by the claim of Gorbachev’s former chief of staff, Valery Boldin, in a memoir full of bile against his former boss, that he showed the originals to the Soviet leader, who instructed him “not to say anything about it.” The discovery of the secret protocols stuns Yakovlev, and he expresses his reaction to Yeltsin in “a few choice words.”

Other files that Yeltsin releases selectively yield up confirmation that Gorbachev regularly read KGB transcripts of Yakovlev’s private telephone conversations. Feeling betrayed one time too often, Yakovlev leaves the Gorbachev Foundation in 1993 and accepts an offer from Yeltsin to direct Ostankino television. He also sets up his own International Democracy Foundation and publishes a devastating account of terror under Lenin and Stalin,
A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia.
From 1996 until his death in 2005 his foundation publishes eightyeight volumes of documents from the Soviet archives.

Yakovlev’s departure creates bad feelings within Gorbachev’s close circle. Chernyaev accuses him of using the foundation’s resources “to circulate myths about himself’ and then, as the winds shifts, deserting Gorbachev for a job with Yeltsin’s government. In his opinion, Yakovlev’s ambition might be forgivable, as he played a key role in destroying the ”Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist lies and demagoguery” that permeated Russia for so many decades, ”but what I can’t forgive is his posturing, at home and abroad, as such a champion of high morality [and] crafting his image as the sole author of perestroika.“
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Boldin stirs the pot by alleging in his memoir that perestroika and new thinking were in fact ”mainly the work of Yakovlev.”

The relationship between Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, the joint architects of the new world order, also comes to an end. “Gorbachev was my friend. We had warm, close relations,” he tells a reporter in Tbilisi after serving ten years as president of Georgia. “We played an important role together to end the Cold War and reunify Europe. Since then, we went our separate ways. Relations between us grew cold. I cannot say we are friends any longer.”
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George H. W. Bush visits Moscow in his last month as president in January 1993 to sign a historic treaty reducing nuclear stockpiles, the climax of a process that owed everything to Gorbachev and Reagan. Not once did Bush mention Gorbachev by name at the joint press conference with President Yeltsin to mark the event.

Bill Clinton, who takes office as U.S. president some two weeks later, doesn’t know at first what to make of Yeltsin. His advisers warn him that Bush harmed U.S. interests by aligning himself too closely with Gorbachev, and he should avoid making the same mistake with his unpredictable successor. Clinton feels he has no choice but to support Yeltsin, “a proud beggar among the great nations,” as the best hope for democratic reform in Russia.

At their first meeting in Vancouver, Clinton observes Yeltsin downing alcoholic drinks through dinner without touching his food. Stories about the Russian’s mammoth drinking bouts begin to circulate at the highest levels. In Washington in 1993 Clinton is notified of a major security alert when Yeltsin, who is staying in Blair House across from the White House, is encountered by secret service agents in his underwear in Pennsylvania Avenue, trying to hail a taxi to go for a pizza. The next evening, again according to Clinton, Yeltsin is mistaken for an intruder as he drunkenly tries to exit through a basement and comes close to getting short.
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As Yeltsin’s health and insomnia worsen during his first term, he is less able to handle copious quantities of alcohol. On a trip to Germany in 1994 he grabs a baton to drunkenly conduct a brass band in the presence of Chancellor Kohl. During a stopover at Shannon airport in Ireland, he fails to get off his plane to meet the waiting Irish prime minister, Albert Reynolds. According to Korzhakov he is ill and, when not allowed off, sits in his underwear and cries. Naina on another occasion scolds Korzhakov for “making my husband a drunk,” to which Yeltsin’s drinking companion claims he retorted, “No, you brought him from Sverdlovsk an alcoholic!”

Throughout his first term Yeltsin is tormented by the cruel impact on people of the change from communism to capitalism. After January 2, 1992, when prices are freed, the rise in prices far exceeds the predictions of IMF economists. Hyperinflation wipes out life savings, turning millions of Russians into paupers and stoking discontent and resentment. Free for the first time in decades to sell what they like, lines of people appear on Moscow streets from every walk of life offering household items from spare shoes to ornamental clocks to make ends meet. With an insufficient money supply to meet everyday needs, conditions deteriorate. Crime increases, salaries go unpaid, and the gap between rich and poor widens. The birth rate falls, and the death rate rises.