Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (8 page)

The system ensured loyalty. The fact that everything belonged to the state and could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice was a disincentive for a cadre to express dissent.

Yeltsin himself gained from the fountain of party benefits. When he became a candidate member of the Politburo, he was assigned a magnificent state dacha, Moskva-reka-5, situated by the river in the village of Usovo, northwest of the capital. It had just been vacated by Gorbachev, who had moved to an even more sumptuous country mansion built to his specifications. When Yeltsin went to inspect his new home, he was met by the commander of the bodyguard, who introduced him to a bevy of cooks, maids, security guards, and gardeners. The former provincial party chief was overwhelmed by the palatial rooms with marble paneling, parquet floors, crystal lighting, an enormous glass-roofed veranda, a home cinema, a billiards room, and a “kitchen big enough to feed an army.” The commander, beaming with delight, asked Yeltsin what he thought of it. The Moscow party chief would say later that he mumbled something inarticulate, while his wife and daughters, Tanya, age twenty-five, and Yelena, age twentyeight, were too overcome and depressed to reply. “Chiefly we were shattered by the senselessness of it all.” Nevertheless, he moved in right away, even before the nails were removed from the walls where Gorbachev’s pictures had hung.

The former Sverdlovsk boss had plunged with zeal into the role of first secretary of the Moscow Communist Party. He believed Gorbachev “knew my character and no doubt felt certain I would be able to clear away the old debris, to fight the mafia, and that I was tough enough to carry out a wholesale cleanup of the personnel.” During the first year of perestroika, he and Gorbachev spoke occasionally. They had a dedicated telephone line to each other. As one of the KGB officers assigned to guard the Moscow party chief, Alexander Korzhakov got the impression that Yeltsin “worshipped” Gorbachev, noting how he would rush to pick up the special handset when it rang.

Yeltsin found that the task of reviving Moscow, the center of the intellectual, cultural, scientific, business, and political life of the country, was impossible under the failing command system. Moreover, he came to the conclusion that his predecessor Viktor Grishin had been an “empty bladder” who had corrupted the Moscow party organization.

The city was in a wretched state. Everywhere there was “dirt, endless queues, overcrowded public transport,” he observed. The vegetable warehouses in particular were a scandal, full of rotting produce, rats, and cockroaches. Sorting and packing was done by resentful squads of citizens dragooned into service.

At first Yeltsin was able to use glasnost as an instrument of reform in Moscow. He summoned a conference of 1,000 members of the Moscow party; there, with Gorbachev looking on, he berated them for being complacent and ostentatious and for exaggerating success while cooking the books. On his instructions, the proceedings were published, and caused a sensation. People queued at newspaper kiosks to read Yeltsin’s outspoken remarks. Gorbachev himself had criticized “bribery, inertia and complete unscrupulousness in party ranks,” but Yeltsin was doing something about it. He was firing Moscow officials he found guilty of “toadyism, servility, and boot-licking.” These included one official called Promyslov, chairman of the city’s executive committee, who spent so much time on foreign junkets that a joke, which came to Yeltsin’s ears, ran that Promyslov made a short stopover in Moscow while flying from Washington to Tokyo. Yeltsin dismissed a party secretary who had the walls of his opulent home covered with animal hides, telling him, “You are only a party leader, not a prince.” He set out to “liquidate” many of the city’s redundant scientific research institutes, which had become the preserve of thousands of idle bureaucrats, something for which the faux members of the Soviet intelligentsia never forgave him. He tried to put a stop to enterprise managers exploiting workers from the countryside, who lacked Moscow residency permits, by hiring them as cheap labor.

The burly fire-breathing Siberian also took to barging unannounced into factories, hospitals, construction sites, schools, kindergartens, restaurants, and shops, as he had done in Sverdlovsk. He confounded managers with statistics. He had a gift for memorizing numbers. After studying documents en route in the car, he would emerge and make a point of showing that he was no ignorant provincial and he knew a thing or two about their business. He took to riding in the crowded Moscow metro and on the city’s ramshackle buses, particularly at rush hours. He joined lines at food stores to see for himself how people were treated. Unrecognized once in a meat shop, he ordered a cut of veal, knowing that a supply had just been delivered. Told there was none available, he charged behind the counter and found it being passed out through a back window. He had the management dismissed.

Yeltsin liked to reward those officials who met his high standards by giving them wrist watches. He would peel the watch from his arm for someone who pleased him, then a few minutes later produce an identical timepiece from his pocket to give to someone else. Once he made his assistant take off his precious Seiko to give to a builder. His bodyguard Korzhakov learned always to carry spare watches in his pocket.
³

This storming of the bureaucracy by Yeltsin at first suited Gorbachev’s purposes in getting things moving. Gorbachev told him, without smiling, that he was a “fresh strong wind” for the party. The general secretary was doing his own round of inspections and meeting the public, but in the old style, giving advance notice that he was coming. On Gorbachev’s first visit as general secretary to a Moscow hospital, the asphalt on the road outside was so fresh the steam was rising, and according to his aide, Valery Boldin, the beds in the wards to which he was directed were occupied by healthy, well-fed security officers with closely cropped hair who warmly recommended the medical staff and the food.
⁴

Politburo members, accustomed to diktat rather than dialogue, fretted about Yeltsin’s populist forays around Moscow. In mid-1986 Gorbachev personally instructed Viktor Afanasyev, the editor of the party newspaper,
Pravda,
to downplay coverage of the publicity-seeking Yeltsin.
⁵
At his urging the propaganda section of the Central Committee called in Mikhail Poltoranin, editor of the Moscow party newspaper,
Moskovskaya Pravda,
to dress him down for giving Yeltsin too much attention.
⁶
In those days the party could have editors fired. Though Gorbachev occasionally spoke up in Yeltsin’s defense, acknowledging that he was clearing the capital of “dirt and crooks,” he distanced himself from the Sverdlovsk “stormer.” So too did Yeltsin’s mentor, Yegor Ligachev, who did not like the way he was pushing party officials around. When Yeltsin shut down some special shops in Moscow, Ligachev lectured him for not making regular stores more efficient.

Resentment of Yeltsin among his comrades erupted in a confrontation on January 19, 1987, at a regular Thursday gathering of the Politburo in the Kremlin. Gorbachev was outlining an important speech he planned to make to the Central Committee on the next stage of reform. The content had been worked out privately in advance, as was usually the case. No one was expected to open their mouth at his presentation. But Yeltsin insisted on making a bellicose critique, raising about twenty comments on the text. In particular he challenged Gorbachev’s assertion that the system was capable of renewal.

“The guarantees enumerated, the socialist system, the Soviet people, the party, have been around for all of seventy years,” he said. “So none of them is a guarantee against a return to the past.” Yeltsin also urged Gorbachev to publicly name past Soviet leaders who were responsible for the country’s stagnation, and he demanded a limit on the general secretary’s term in office.

He had, he would later assert, become contemptuous of Gorbachev’s “selfdelusions,” his alleged fondness for the perks of office, and his tolerance for officials continuing to live opulent lives during perestroika.

Gorbachev was livid. His prepared critique of the shortcomings of Soviet rule was already as severe as the party members could swallow. Furious, he got up and stalked out of the room. For thirty minutes the entire Politburo sat in silence, avoiding Yeltsin’s eye.

The general secretary of the Communist Party had worked hard to get agreement from individual Politburo members on the propositions for reform in his speech. He considered the initiatives vital to his task of turning the ship of state around slowly and carefully without running it onto the rocks. He had taken risks with hard-liners by loosening party control. He had eased the suppression of religion and set free scores of political prisoners. Just a month previously he had released the exiled Nobel Prize—winning scientist and dissident Andrey Sakharov from internal exile in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). Editors were being allowed to hint at the truth about the terrors of the Stalin period and to fill in the “blank pages” of Soviet history. He was winding down the war in Afghanistan. He was about to announce the most radical reform in seventy years of totalitarian communism, the introduction of a form of managed democracy that would enable direct elections to a Congress of People’s Deputies. He was doing this in the face of widespread resistance to perestroika by party apparatchiks who saw their sinecures threatened.

And here was this disrespectful braggart from Sverdlovsk accusing him of maintaining the old ways.

When he came back to the room, Gorbachev let fly at Yeltsin in a sustained harangue that lasted more than thirty minutes. Yeltsin’s reproofs were “loud and vacuous,” he cried angrily. He never did anything but offer destructive criticism, and many people in Moscow were complaining about his “rudeness, lack of objectivity, and even cruelty.” According to Yeltsin it was “a tirade that had nothing to do with the substance of my comments, but was aimed at me personally,” with the general secretary swearing at him in “almost market porter’s language.”

The tough construction engineer and scourge of Moscow’s party hacks was crushed by Gorbachev’s furious response. When the lecture was over, Yeltsin apologized lamely, saying, “I’ve learned my lesson, and I think that it was not too soon.”

He later reflected, “There can be no doubt that at that moment Gorbachev simply hated me.”

CHAPTER 6

DECEMBER 25: MIDMORNING

In contrast to the Kremlin, the Russian White House is already crackling with activity on the morning of December 25, 1991. The imposing ten-year-old edifice of marble and glass, constructed in the shape of a giant submarine with a fourteen-story conning tower, is headquarters of the Russian government. The building has been a symbol of national resistance to totalitarianism since the failed August coup, when Yeltsin stood on a tank outside to defy the hard-line communists attempting to impose emergency rule and keep the Soviet Union intact. It contains the Russian Supreme Soviet, the parliament elected the previous year in the first free vote in Russia since the founding of the USSR. Before that the White House was dismissed by cynical Muscovites as a white elephant, housing a sham government and parliament, whose members were handpicked by the party and who rubber-stamped everything put in front of them. It is now home to a lively, fractious elected assembly that only two weeks ago voted, on Yeltsin’s urging, to take Russia out of the dying Soviet Union by the end of the year.

Visitors climbing the terraced steps are greeted by a magnificent depiction of the imperial two-headed, red-tongued eagle of tsarist Russia rather than, as before, the giant statue of Lenin standing in a recess in the hall, which is still there but which has been shrouded by curtains. In the reception rooms the large pictures of the Soviet founder that were once obligatory have been replaced with reproduction landscapes of silver birch and snow. The Russian tricolor flutters gaily from the roof, and little replica flags adorn the desks of the ministers inside. The cafeteria, so well-stocked in the days before the party system of privileges broke down, still manages to supply deputies and parliamentary staff with bread and sausage. Even in the White House, however, the shortages are evident. The ornate blue-tiled bathrooms on the fifth floor often do not have any lavatory paper; parliamentary deputies are suspected of pocketing the toilet rolls that are installed first thing in the morning and taking them home.
¹

Boris Yeltsin enters from the basement car park and takes the private lift to his spacious office on the fifth floor. There his aide Viktor Ilyushin has laid out on his desk the December 25 editions of the Russian newspapers. A dry apparatchik in his early forties, Ilyushin has been Yeltsin’s assistant since Sverdlovsk days. Over the years he has learned to bear patiently the brunt of his boss’s sometimes petulant outbursts. He always arrives first to prepare the day’s schedule and present Yeltsin with the most important documents.

The broadsheets devote considerable space to a series of fresh presidential decrees signed by Yeltsin the previous day, taking over departments and properties from the defunct Soviet government.

Where the Soviet Union was established by sword and gun, it is being dismantled by decree. In the previous two months Yeltsin has been appropriating Soviet assets simply by signing one decree after another. He undermined the demoralized USSR government by first withholding Russian taxes and then taking ownership of Soviet government ministries and the currency mint. All that Mikhail Gorbachev is left with are titles, a small staff, and the nuclear suitcase.

Before Gorbachev’s glasnost, the newspapers were dull, mendacious, and heavily censored. The main organs of information, the Communist Party newspaper
Pravda
and the government newspaper
Izvestia
printed only what the party allowed.
Pravda
and
Izvestia
translated as “truth” and “news,” and cynics would quip that “in the
Truth
there is no news, and in the
News
there is no truth.” Today they are full of free-wheeling reportage. It is the time of the greatest press freedom in Russian history, before or since. “At the end of 1991 Russia had the most free press probably in the world,” in the opinion of Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister. “It was free from official control. It was free from censorship. It was free from the opinion of the readers. It was free from the owners. Of course it could not survive.”
²
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
(Independent Newspaper) is one of the most popular dailies for its investigative reporting, a great journalistic novelty for Russian readers.
Kommersant
(Businessman) has reappeared for the first time since the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, its name deliberately spelled in prerevolutionary style to show it has outlasted the communist era.
Pravda,
once the infallible mouthpiece of the Communist Party—it always had to be put on top of the pile of daily newspapers for sale—is struggling to survive and has seen its circulation drop from almost ten million to less than one million. Its youth equivalent,
Komsomolskaya Pravda,
previously the organ of the now-defunct Young Communist League or Komsomol, has transformed itself into a lively news sheet. Its cheeky city counterpart,
Moskovsky Komsomolets,
has become so irreverent that a year ago it relegated the news of Gorbachev’s Nobel Peace Prize to page three, below the fold. The other papers on Yeltsin’s desk include the more solid
Izvestia,
the former Soviet government newspaper, now the most reliable high-circulation Russian daily;
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
(Russian Gazette), the organ of the Russian parliament;
Sovetskaya Rossiya
(Soviet Russia), the herald of the reactionaries; and
Trud
(Labor), the newspaper of the Soviet trade unions, which has seen its circulation collapse from a world record twenty-one million the year before to under two million.