Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (5 page)

Yeltsin, too, is preparing to move. He and his family will take possession of the presidential dacha when the Gorbachevs move out, and give up their smaller country home, which belongs to the Russian Federation. He has decided that the Soviet leader’s mansion should become the future residence of the Russian president. Not being on good social terms, Yeltsin has never been invited to the Gorbachevs’ city apartment on Lenin Hills, a choice suburb next to Moscow University (since renamed Sparrow Hills), and he does not know whether he will appropriate it as well until he makes an inspection and decides whether he would prefer it to the one he has now.

After Yeltsin showers, Naina blow-dries and combs his hair and helps him dress in an expensive white shirt, blue patterned tie, and smart, dark-colored made-to-measure suit. He sits down for his wife to lace his shoes, a chore he finds difficult because of his bulk. His black shoes are, as always, buffed to a mirror-like sheen.
⁸

When Yeltsin was elected president in June of the Russian republic, the largest of the fifteen republics that made up the Soviet Union, his vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, a former air force colonel, decided Russia’s top official should dress with greater elegance. Rutskoy used his own military coupons to purchase an expensive new suit and several high-quality shirts. Yeltsin accepted the gifts but insisted on meeting the cost. Rutskoy used to embarrass him like that. One day he came into Yeltsin’s office and said with a horrified look, “Where did you get those shoes? You shouldn’t be wearing shoes like that. You’re the president.” And the next day he appeared with six pairs of Italian shoes.
⁹

Before going out into the hallway the bear-like Russian chieftain meekly subjects himself to a final inspection by his wife and daughter. Every morning Naina makes sure that her Borya’s tie is straight, that there are no flecks of dust on his shoulders, and that his splendid helmet of hair is perfectly in place. After the grooming, she always puts a ten-ruble note in his breast pocket so Yeltsin can pay for his own snacks or lunch.

Boris runs Russia, but Naina runs the household. She is the
khozyaika,
the woman of the house, so much in charge at home that the most powerful man in the country hands over his pay packet every month, as he has done since they were married thirty-five years ago in Sverdlovsk, and she gives him an allowance out of it. “Without her,” Yeltsin admits, “I would never have borne up under so many political storms . . . not in 1987, not in 1991.”
¹⁰
But in all other matters Boris makes the decisions. “He always has the last word,” she explained once, “and he protects us like a stone wall.”
¹¹

In the evening the ceremony is performed in reverse. The women line up to welcome him home, take off his clothes up to his underwear, and put on his house slippers. “The only thing he does is raise his arms and legs,” observed Korzhakov. In the opinion of his assistant, Lev Sukhanov, Naina is the most long-suffering wife in the country. “What she had to experience in connection with her husband no one else has experienced. She felt all the effects of his struggle with the party machine, which I can affirm was absolutely ruthless and fought dirty.”
¹²

At nine o’clock Yeltsin leaves the hallway, where a golf club rests among the umbrellas, given him by the Swedish ice hockey player Sven Tumba when he opened Moscow’s first golf course two years ago. Yeltsin does not play golf but is passionate about tennis and volleyball, and he likes to tell foreign visitors he was a member of the Russian Federation volleyball team. This isn’t true, but he has apparently come to believe it himself.

After descending in the small elevator of the apartment block, he steps outside and enters a black Niva with the engine running. Yeltsin used a modest Moskvich sedan when campaigning for votes seven months back—it was useful for his image as a man of the people—but since he was elected president, Korzhakov has insisted on the chunky four-wheel drive for better security. Yeltsin sits on the right-hand side in the back, with Korzhakov in the passenger seat in front of him, cradling an automatic weapon. The two other bodyguards in the car also nurse sidearms. The Niva is preceded and followed by cars carrying militia guards. The city has been awash with rumors of a second coup attempt by diehard pro-Soviet elements in the military in a last ditch effort to preserve the Soviet Union. As head of Yeltsin’s personal security, Korzhakov is taking no chances.

The Niva crosses Tverskaya Street, where the police have stopped the traffic, and proceeds along Great Gruzinskaya Street, through the grounds of the decrepit city zoo and onto Kopushkovskaya Street. In five minutes it reaches its destination, the marble and concrete skyscraper on the Moscow River embankment known as the Russian White House. The car descends into the basement garage. For now, this building is Yeltsin’s power base. Very soon it will be the Kremlin.

CHAPTER 3

HIRING THE BULLDOZER

The resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev on December 25, 1991, will mark the end of a long-drawn-out and bitter struggle for power. It began not long after he was chosen as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on March 11, 1985, on the death of his predecessor Konstantin Chernenko. As the ruling party in a one-party state, the Communist Party’s leader was the person who ran the country. Right away Gorbachev began putting together his own team to take charge. One of the first things he did was to recruit Boris Yeltsin.

The Soviet Union that Gorbachev inherited was a moribund, totalitarian society. Outwardly it appeared stable. The non-Russian republics seemingly acquiesced in rule from the Kremlin. Soviet engineers had sent the first man into space. Its military matched the West in weaponry. Soviet athletes were among the best in the world. The vast majority of its inhabitants were literate, and higher education was within everyone’s reach.

But thousands of political prisoners languished in detention camps, a legacy of the Stalin era. There was no independent media, no right of assembly, no free emigration, no democracy, limited freedom of religion, and near zero tolerance for public criticism of those at the top. Corruption and alcoholism were a way of life. The courts did the bidding of the party, and the police and the KGB could arrest anyone without legal redress. The secret police stamped out unauthorized activities, from art shows to student discussion groups. Foreign books, journals, and movies with unapproved content were banned.

By the mid-1980s the command economy imposed by Stalin was in crisis. City dwellers had a tolerable standard of living, but most of the rural population endured wretched conditions. Lack of competition and dependence on world oil sales had stifled domestic manufacturing. The country was involved in a costly and dangerous arms race with the West and an unpopular war in Afghanistan, which Soviet troops had invaded in 1979.

It was a society pervaded by cynicism. Many people joked that they pretended to work and the government pretended to pay them, and that the four most serious problems facing agriculture were spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

Things had to change. People were becoming aware of how the country was being left behind by the capitalist world in terms of freedoms and standard of living. A new generation of Russians was growing restless at censorship and travel restrictions. The aging communist leaders sensed the dangers and the need for improvement. That was why they had turned to the youngest and most energetic comrade in the top ranks, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Born on March 2, 1931, in a village on the fertile steppes of southern Russia, Gorbachev was an earnest communist from his teenage days. In his formative years the country was in thrall to Stalin’s cult of personality. At eighteen, he graduated from school with a silver medal for an essay entitled “Stalin—Our Combat Glory; Stalin—the Elation of Our Youth.” He studied law at Moscow State University, where he was open to new ideas, while aware that any deviation from the official line was, as he put it, “fraught with consequences.” He was active in the university Komsomol, the young communist movement. There he met Raisa Maximovna Titorenko, an earnest student in the philosophy department and a convinced believer in Marxism-Leninism, though her thesis on collective farms gave her an insight into the miserable life of peasants under communism. They married in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. In later years Gorbachev would joke that she was the head of “our family party cell.”

Conciliatory, smooth, and garrulous, Gorbachev was noticed by his elders as a natural-born political leader. He joined the party at the age of twenty-one and slipped easily into the role of apparatchik, a professional party member who makes a career in administration. Exceptionally, for a careerist, he looked at things with a critical eye. He became convinced early on that “there was something wrong in our country.” This was reinforced when he visited Czechoslovakia in 1969 with a party delegation and was met with rudeness by furious Czechs and Slovaks. The previous year, Soviet tanks had crushed the communist reform movement that had led to the Prague Spring and the promise of a more prosperous and just society.

In 1970 he was appointed first party secretary—akin to governor—in the Stavropol region, a rich agricultural area the size of West Virginia. Touring his fiefdom he found “sheer misery and complete devastation” everywhere. He met and charmed important Soviet figures who vacationed in nearby Black Sea resorts and who would later sponsor his upward climb. Eight years later he was brought to Moscow and shortly afterwards appointed to the Politburo, the syndicate of a dozen senior communist officials who determined everything in Soviet life, from war and peace to the price of vodka and bread rolls. He stood out among his older comrades with his combination of youthful energy, toughness, and effervescent optimism that problems could be solved with debate and imagination.

Though put in charge of agriculture, Gorbachev was sent abroad to get acquainted with foreign leaders. His suave manner and keen intellect charmed dignitaries more accustomed to impassive Soviet figures programmed to say
nyet
. He charmed Margaret Thatcher so much with his new thinking on international relations—consultation rather than confrontation—that the Iron Lady famously commented, “I like Mister Gorbachev. We can do business together.” Foreigners found him to be almost subversive. When a French official visiting Moscow asked when an agriculture problem had arisen that had delayed their meeting, the future general secretary replied with a smile, “In 1917.”

Gorbachev believed that the country was in a parlous state and could only be saved by fundamental reforms and the end of the Cold War. His comrade Eduard Shevardnadze shared this view. In December 1984, while vacationing together in the Black Sea resort of Pitsunda, the Georgian told him, “Everything’s rotten. It has to be changed.” It was almost heretical to utter such words aloud. Gorbachev now echoed them, in private, within hours of being given the top job by the Politburo. “We can’t go on living like this,” he told Raisa as they walked in their Moscow suburban garden, shivering in a temperature of 15 degrees Fahrenheit, after getting home at 4 a.m. from the Kremlin on March 12, 1985. Even the general secretary of the Communist Party would not risk saying such things indoors, for fear of KGB microphones.

Other influential voices urged him to make changes. Valery Boldin, a
Pravda
editor who had been his personal assistant for five years, warned him that a collapse in the economy could provoke a social explosion at any time.

When Gorbachev looked around for new blood in the party ranks, Yegor Ligachev, his silver-haired deputy, recommended Boris Yeltsin, the party chief in Sverdlovsk. “This is our type of person—we have to pick him!” enthused Ligachev.

Boris Yeltsin was born on February 1, 1931, in the impoverished western Siberian village of Butko in Sverdlovsk province. He started life with a splash. During his baptism the drunken priest dropped him in the font, and he had to be fished out by his mother. As a youth he was athletic, headstrong, outspoken, and quarrelsome. He also had an exhibitionist urge. At a school assembly Yeltsin accused an unpopular teacher of cruelty, which caused an uproar. She was eventually dismissed. Though he won his case, the school record stated his discipline to be “unsatisfactory.” Always a ring leader and daredevil, he lost the thumb and index finger of his left hand when he and his pals experimented with a stolen hand grenade.

In college Yeltsin studied engineering, became a model construction specialist, and later won promotion to chief engineer and then to head of the House-Building Combine in Sverdlovsk, a heavily industrialized city closed to foreigners. In 1956 he married Naina Iosifovna Girina, who was studying to be a sanitary engineer.

Yeltsin did not apply to join the Communist Party until he was thirty, and then mainly to ensure his promotion to chief of the Sverdlovsk construction directorate. Through his force of character and organizational skills, he rose through the party ranks until in 1976 he was promoted to first secretary of Sverdlovsk region. This made him the boss of one of the most important industrial centers of the USSR, as big as Washington State and with a population of four and a half million.

Hard-driving and authoritarian, Yeltsin often engaged in the old-style communist practice of “storming” to get a job done in record time. He admitted once that he was a fairly well-known type of Russian who needs to constantly prove his physical strength and load himself up to complete exhaustion. He made a practice of making unannounced visits to factories, walking in on school classes, going down mineshafts, tramping over fields, and squeezing into decrepit buses to hear about problems firsthand. He fired corrupt and incompetent managers and held televised meetings with citizens to answer their questions and complaints—daring actions for the time.