Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (7 page)

Before entering his office Mikhail Gorbachev leaves the television crew and slips into a small room off the corridor, where his hairdresser, a young woman, is waiting to give him his daily grooming.
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It is a morning ritual of his, especially when something important is to take place, to make sure he looks presidential. The stylist gives his nape and sideburns a slight shave and combs and dries his hair. Today his appearance is more important than usual, because in a few hours he will make a televised address that will be seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

According to the transition agreement he made with Yeltsin on Monday, Gorbachev can continue to occupy his Kremlin office for another four days, until Sunday. This will allow him time to keep previously arranged appointments, grant a few final interviews, and clear out his desk. Only yesterday Gorbachev had gathered the staff in the Walnut Room close to his office and for the first time informed the forty or fifty men and women gathered there—advisers, assistants, and heads of departments—that he was resigning within twenty-four hours and that they would all have to leave the Kremlin no later than December 29.

There is some evidence, however, that Yeltsin’s Russian government is growing impatient and that the transition period may not be respected. The president’s spokesman, Andrey Grachev, feels that the appropriate funeral rites for the deceased are being dispensed with and that the new tenants are anxious to move in and are already “pressing the relatives of the departed to vacate the premises.”

Yeltsin’s guards have started to take over the checkpoints in the Kremlin and position themselves almost menacingly in the shadowy alcoves in the corridors. Until a few days ago, Officer Valery Pestov was head of Gorbachev’s security service, but on December 16 he was told that he had been transferred to Yeltsin’s command. Gorbachev only found this out when told by a secretary. New security personnel and ushers have taken the place of the regular sentinels. The incoming masters have ordered Gorbachev’s staff not to lock their office doors or their desk drawers and to keep open the enormous burgundy-colored filing cabinets in the corridor. They have begun stopping his officials to search their belongings and ascertain what is being carried in and out.

The Soviet president passes the checkpoints without hindrance, but some of his aides and junior officials are regularly delayed and harassed. When an overeager sentry demands to inspect the briefcase of Ruslan Aushev, chairman of the Commission on Afghan Affairs and a Hero of the Soviet Union, later the president of Ingushetia, Aushev slaps him in the face. Stunned, the guard lets him pass. Vitaly Gusenkov, a Gorbachev aide, is detained for some time and only released when he threatens loudly to complain directly to the president.

Gorbachev’s most senior adviser, Anatoly Chernyaev, is able to take his brief case past the new guards without hindrance; he believes they respect him as a sort of elder statesman. By this means he manages to take some sensitive documents out of the Kremlin. But he has no illusions about what is going on. The Russian president wants to torture his predecessor with petty humiliations, he reckons. It all smacks of banditry in the spirit of Yeltsin, “and Mikhail Sergeyevich still insists on a civilized transfer of power!”
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The Kremlin receptionists have come in at their usual time, but practically all that remains for them to do is to sort out the personal books Gorbachev is taking away and discard old papers. There are no longer any attendants in his cloakrooms. No telephones are ringing, insisting to be answered. Yeltsin has taken charge of all government communications and disconnected most lines. One of the five white phones by Gorbachev’s desk is still connected, but it, too, is mostly silent.

Chernyaev discovers that the dedicated telephone in his office along the corridor has been assigned to someone else. He can still use the telephone to dial out, “but someone called, and it is not for me.” One message does get through to him. Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister, Gennady Burbulis, calls to inform him, in his high-pitched, precise voice, that he must wind things down sharply. Burbulis, it seems, has earmarked Chernyaev’s space for himself and is impatient to move in.

Shortly before 10:30 a.m., refreshed and slightly scented from his hairdresser’s attention, Gorbachev enters his presidential office past the cramped reception area where the secretaries and bodyguards sit, and walks across the carpeted parquet floor to take his customary seat in the high-backed leather chair behind his desk. It is a big, gloomy room, forty feet long and twenty feet wide, with wainscoting and a high ceiling. White damask drapes hang over the windows, and a six-foot-high bookcase takes up half of an adjoining wall. On one side are a worktable and a low coffee table with easy chairs, where he relaxes with visitors. Gorbachev’s desk of dark cherrywood with solid top and base is in the corner by the window. Behind it stands a ceiling-high red Soviet flag. In front of the desk are two adjacent leather armchairs, which self-important visitors try to avoid. Sitting in them means having to look up at the president behind his desk. In the corner is a safe containing top secret documents and some personal items, including a Makarov pistol with gold inlay that he received as a present from Viktor Chebrikov, head of the KGB from 1982 to 1988.

Off the anteroom is the Walnut Room, where major decisions were until recently made by Gorbachev and a select few communist leaders, often with no note takers present, to be ratified in the adjoining Politburo Room. The Politburo Room was once Stalin’s office. It is often referred to as the “shoe room” because the table is shaped like the sole of a shoe. It has not been used since the party was outlawed and the Politburo disbanded after the August coup. On the table rests a control console that opens a special wall panel to expose a series of maps, which are also redundant. Many city and street names and even the titles of the fifteen Soviet-era republics have reverted to their prerevolutionary forms in the past year, and from today the almost invisible dotted lines between the republics will become solid international borders with customs and immigration posts.

The two colonels with the nuclear suitcase have, as always, followed the president into the reception room attached to his office. They place the black object with sharp metal corners on a table so that it is in view. If there is a nuclear alert, a light will flash. This has never happened since the
chemodanchik
was invented in 1983, in the final phases of the Cold War, to provide Soviet leaders with a remote communications system to minimize reaction time should a missile be detected heading towards the USSR. The device has never left Gorbachev’s side since 1985. In an emergency the top leaders can converse with each other and with the strategic forces command center at Chekhov, a small town outside Moscow linked to the Kremlin by a secret KGB subway known as Moscow Metro II. If one leader should be incapacitated by a nuclear strike, two others can authorize retaliatory action.

Occasionally the colonels have taken Gorbachev through the procedure, showing how in an emergency the president can monitor the trajectory of a suspect missile on a screen inside the case linked into the Soviet Union’s command and control network,
Kazbek,
and converse with the defense minister and strategic command center by satellite telephone. The system was designed to respond to the U.S. Pershing medium-range ballistic missile, which has a sevenminute trajectory. By pressing one of a row of buttons inside the suitcase, the president can approve different kinds of reactions, from a limited reprisal to nuclear Armageddon.

Contrary to popular belief, the three nuclear suitcases do not contain the codes necessary to unlock the safety mechanisms on nuclear missiles. The president can authorize access to these codes, however. If all the briefcase holders are killed in an attack, officers of the general staff have codes to launch counterstrikes on their own initiative.

Andrey Grachev notes that besides the two colonels, the normally bustling anteroom is strangely empty. Not a single visitor is present, other than the Americans from ABC television. The appointments diary is blank.

Gorbachev’s English-language interpreter, Pavel Palazchenko, finds the Kremlin corridors “hushed, even more quiet than usual” as he arrives and walks along the corridor to his cubicle-sized office filled with dictionaries. The interpreter, whose bald head and moustache are often seen over Gorbachev’s shoulder at international gatherings, senses an air of inevitability about what is happening in the Kremlin, where he has never felt at home since Gorbachev moved his presidential staff here from party headquarters in Old Square some months ago.

Palazchenko also senses something hostile in the building. It is as if, he feels, “the environment itself is trying to eject us.”

CHAPTER 5

THE STORMING OF MOSCOW

Less than a year after he took office, Mikhail Gorbachev summoned Communist Party leaders from all over the Soviet Union to a great congress in the Kremlin. As Moscow city boss, Boris Yeltsin saw to it that the streets of the capital were decorated with red banners for the occasion.

The day of the conference, February 25, 1986, was clear and bitterly cold, with the temperature hovering around zero. Inside the conference hall the new general secretary got a warm reception from the 5,000 delegates. They expected much from the dynamic new leader after the stagnation of the previous two decades.

At this, the Twenty-seventh Party Congress, Gorbachev launched his ambitious reform program to revitalize the Soviet economy. He called it perestroika, or restructuring. Its aim was to renew Soviet-style socialism through greater freedom for initiative and to liberalize society through glasnost, or openness.

Gorbachev had worked on his speech to the congress for several days at his holiday dacha in Pitsunda, with the help of his close collaborator, Alexander Yakovlev. A heavy-jowled, balding man in his late sixties, with large plasticrimmed glasses and his left knee stiff from a war wound, Yakovlev provided much of the intellectual drive for perestroika. Gorbachev had met him in May 1983, when he visited Canada, where Yakovlev was semi-exiled as Soviet ambassador after speaking out against Russian chauvinism.

In fact perestroika could be traced back to a long and frank discussion Gorbachev and Yakovlev held in the backyard of a farm in Amherstburg, Ontario.
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The ambassador told him there how the Canadian system was superior because openness and democracy acted as a check on corruption. Yakovlev so impressed Gorbachev as a liberal but loyal party theoretician that he had him brought back to Moscow and made a candidate member of the Politburo. Behind the scenes the former ambassador urged his comrade to think dangerous thoughts, like splitting the party in two, holding elections, and lifting censorship on the press.

Raisa listened to the discussions that day in Pitsunda and participated, chiding them for ignoring the plight of women and the family in Soviet society.

When he took the podium at the congress, Gorbachev lectured the delegates on the need to combat corruption and inertia. He promised that with perestroika, living conditions would improve and consumer goods would become more available. He spoke of “new thinking” in international relations, meaning noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs, and said that Moscow must turn away from the policy of military confrontation with the West. He made it clear that everything that was not forbidden by law was to be allowed, reversing the unwritten rule that everything not expressly allowed was prohibited.

He also called a halt to the party habit of delivering panegyrics to the general secretary and shortly afterwards cut short lavish words of praise from Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he had appointed foreign minister, earning a round of amused applause. Party hacks nevertheless queued at the microphone to herald the new leader’s wisdom.

When Boris Yeltsin reached the podium, everyone expected another paean of praise for perestroika. However, like the schoolboy taking on the teacher, he criticized one of the “zones beyond criticism”—the secret privileges enjoyed by party members. His few months in Moscow had made him aware of the level of public resentment over this system of lavish perks. “Let a leader go to an ordinary store and stand in line there, like everyone else,” he boomed. “Then perhaps the queues, of which everyone is sick and tired, will disappear sooner.”

There was consternation. This was a particularly sensitive subject. Many of the delegates had secured their high positions in the party specifically to improve the quality of their lives by
not
having to go to ordinary stores and queue with everyone else.

Special privileges for Communist Party members had long been a fixed part of Soviet society. The party compensated its leaders generously for their “services to the people,” according to a rigid system called the Table of Ranks that mimicked a formal list of positions and ranks in tsarist Russia.

At the top, the members of the Politburo and the top party secretariat, some twenty-five in number, were free to use a special squadron of Ilyushin-62 long-range jetliners and Tupolev-134 twin-engine airliners to fly anywhere they wanted. Each was allocated four personal bodyguards, a large Zil limousine equipped with a radio telephone, and a state-owned country house with cooks, waitresses, and gardeners, as well as free time-shares in luxurious state holiday dachas at Black Sea resorts. Volga sedans were provided for members’ wives, with drivers on twenty-four-hour call and Kremlin number plates that made militiamen snap to attention.
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Everything was paid for by the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, a 40,000-strong uniformed bodyguard for party leaders and their families, which also operated a separate government-party telephone system. A spouse could order a bodyguard to get presents, pick up a tailor for a fitting, or do the shopping. Other grades of party members received packages of choice foodstuffs delivered from “special” shops closed to outsiders. Thousands of middle- and lower-ranking apparatchiks had access to different levels of supplies from private stores and to treatment in special medical clinics.