Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (9 page)

All the newspapers report that the Russian parliament has the previous day approved a resolution freeing up prices on January 2.
Izvestia
warns in a headline: “Prices for Bread, Milk, Sugar, Vodka, Medicine, Fuel, Electricity, Rents, Fares Can Rise by Three to Five Times.” Its report says: “To use a well-known expression about democracy, free prices is the worst method of relations between buyers and sellers—if you disregard all the others.”

One of Yeltsin’s decrees listed in today’s
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
disbands the KGB, which is in the process of being transformed into the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB, the federal security agency of Russia, which will be based like its predecessor in the Lubyanka. Another orders the conversion to Russian ownership of the communist-era USSR State Bank.
Izvestia
reports that the chief executive, Vitaly Gerashchenko, has submitted his resignation. “It has not yet been accepted, but this is obviously only a matter of a few days, or maybe hours.” This cornerstone of the Soviet Union’s economy will in future prop up a new Russian financial system.

The newspaper also reports that Yeltsin has ordered several iconic state properties in Moscow to be transferred immediately from Soviet to Russian ownership. They are the Bolshoi Theatre, the Mali Theatre, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the Lenin Library, the Academy of Arts, Moscow State University, St. Petersburg State University, the State Historical Museum, the Hermitage Museum, the Pushkin Museum of Arts, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Rublyov Museum of Old Russian Culture and Arts, the Anthropological and Ethnographic Museum, the State Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR, the State Museum of Eastern Art, and the Polytechnic Museum. Until now all these institutions were as much the property of the other Soviet republics as that of Russia. They can do little about their seizure by Russia, except to lay claim to Soviet property on their own territories. The list is topped by the most prestigious property in the whole of the Soviet Union. This is “the Kremlin and all its contents including the architectural ensemble, the Moscow Kremlin State Historical and Cultural Museum Preserve, and the Kremlin Palace of Congresses.” The symbol and heart of Soviet power for most of the century belongs to Russia now. The Soviet president is there today only on sufferance.

Outside its borders, the personnel and property of the USSR are also being transferred to Russia. Yury Vorontsov in New York wakes up on this morning as the long-serving ambassador of the communist superpower to the United Nations and will go to bed this evening as the ambassador of capitalist Russia. Vorontsov changes his status at midnight Moscow Time (4 p.m. the previous day in New York) by simply delivering to the UN Secretary-General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar y de la Guerra, fax number 2338 from the office of the Russian president in Moscow. It informs the secretary-general that as the successor state to the USSR, Russia will take the Soviet Union’s seat in the UN Security Council as one of the five permanent members with veto powers, and “henceforth the name Russian Federation will be used in the United Nations instead of USSR.” It asks Pérez de Cuéllar to regard as official agents of the Russian Federation all the diplomats who until that day were Soviet representatives.

Only three years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev dazzled the General Assembly with his sweeping vision of a new world order for the twenty-first century that would be regulated by the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, which together would promote dialogue rather than confrontation and would work to eliminate nuclear weapons.

Yeltsin’s team has already taken possession of the Soviet foreign ministry in Moscow, seized its bank accounts, evicted the last Soviet foreign minister of the Gorbachev era, Eduard Shevardnadze, and installed Yeltsin’s foreign minister, Andrey Kozyrev. Throughout the day, Soviet embassies in different time zones around the world receive a communique from Kozyrev informing them that they all are about to become the foreign missions of Russia. Non-Russian Soviet diplomats will have to set up separate embassies for their own republics, which is the privilege and price of their independence. The communique instructs the diplomats that by December 31 the Soviet flag is to be lowered for the last time on every embassy building around the world and the Russian tricolor hoisted in its place. Some envoys are anxious to declare their allegiance to the new order without delay. Already the white, blue, and red emblem is flying prematurely at the embassies in New Delhi, Teheran, and Kabul.

In Washington, DC, on Christmas morning the red flag with hammer-and-sickle emblem is hanging limply from the mast above the first floor of the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street. It is a still, mild day with the temperature 12 degrees above freezing. Inside, the three hundred staff are dividing themselves into ethnic groups and claiming temporary diplomatic space by putting up the names of their republics on office doors. There is considerable chaos, compounded by a shortage of cash. Senior diplomats have had to give up comfortable homes in Maryland and Virginia and move into rooms in the embassy compound because there is no hard currency available from Moscow to pay their rents. Ambassador Viktor Komplektov has been in office only nine months, and he knows that, unlike his counterpart at the United Nations, his days are numbered. He is not trusted by Yeltsin because of his failure to condemn the coup in August. For three days before it collapsed, he enthusiastically disseminated the press releases of the putschists to the American media and peddled their lie to the U.S. government that Gorbachev was ill and unable to continue his duties. The fifty-one-year-old ambassador decides to use the remains of his Soviet-era budget to hold the embassy’s first ever Christmas party as a “last hurrah” for the USSR.

With caviar, sturgeon, champagne, and vodka, the Soviet embassy in Washington goes down like the
Titanic
. “Enjoy yourselves,” Komplektov tells the four hundred guests. “This is the way we celebrate a grand occasion.”
³
Afterwards the red flag is lowered, and the Russian colors are raised in its place, signifying it is now the Russian embassy. Komplektov is recalled within three months.

Perversely, in Israel a new Soviet mission opens this morning. As if nothing has changed in Moscow, the first Soviet ambassador in thirty-four years presents his credentials to President Herzog, and the red flag with hammer and sickle is hoisted over the ancient Russian Compound in Jerusalem. This anomaly arises from a promise Mikhail Gorbachev made two months previously, when he still had some authority, to his Israeli counterpart, Yitzhak Shamir, that he would restore Soviet-Israeli relations broken off at the time of the 1967 Middle East War. The credentials of the envoy, Alexander Bovin, are the last to be signed by a Soviet leader. Bovin’s destiny is to be Soviet ambassador for a week and then become ambassador of Russia, based in Tel Aviv, where he will remain in office for a further six years.

In Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the largest port of the Canary Islands, a Soviet cruise ship docks this Christmas morning. The passengers disembark for a day’s sightseeing. When they return they find that the hammer and sickle on the side of the funnel has been prised off by the Russian crew, and they sail away, citizens of a different country than when they boarded.

Approaching eleven o’clock President Boris Yeltsin leaves his office in the White House and takes the elevator down to the packed hall of the Russian Supreme Soviet. The 252 members of the upper chamber of the Russian Congress of Peoples’ Deputies have been summoned to the chamber to make history. They take their places on polished wooden benches beneath an eggshell-blue ceiling and massive circular chandelier to decide whether or not to approve the final dismemberment of the Soviet Union.

CHAPTER 7

A BUCKETFUL OF FILTH

Despite Yeltsin’s strenuous efforts, the situation in Moscow did not noticeably improve throughout 1986 and 1987. His replacements in senior posts were often just as corrupt or inefficient as those he fired. “We keep digging to get rid of all this filth, but we still haven’t found the bottom of this black hole,” he complained in a talk with Moscow trade officials. The research institutes ignored his demands for staff reductions. Food continued to rot in railway yards. He worked from 7 a.m. to midnight, his dissatisfaction growing all the while. Arriving home he often sat in the car for several minutes, so exhausted, “I did not have the strength to raise my arm.”
¹

He grew more alienated from his comrades in the Politburo. It rankled with Yeltsin that after nearly two years in charge of Moscow he had still not been elevated to full membership of the Politburo, as his predecessors in the Moscow post had been, and that he was answerable to Yegor Ligachev, who believed that instead of radical change the party’s goal should be the strengthening of the USSR’s brand of socialism. Ligachev, the party puritan, saw him now as a dangerous populist.

After the fractious Politburo meeting of January 1987, Gorbachev began to pointedly shun the awkward Moscow party boss. He did his best to avoid shaking Yeltsin’s hand or speaking with him at the Thursday Politburo sessions. Yeltsin’s attack on party privileges had touched a raw nerve with him. Gorbachev did indeed like to live well. Besides building a palatial Moscow home, he had ordered the construction of an immense and architecturally tasteless summer residence for his exclusive use at Foros on the Black Sea. Even his most devoted aides were uneasy about his extravagant use of state funds. Georgy Shakhnazarov worried that it gave people reason to criticize him for his love of luxury. When he first saw the great mansion, with its glass-enclosed escalator down to the beach, his loyal adviser Anatoly Chernyaev too began to have serious doubts about “the perquisites attending his great historic mission.”
²

Yeltsin was a misfit in Gorbachev’s otherwise obedient team. He began voicing opinions that were heretical at the time. In May 1987, when Diane Sawyer, in Moscow for the CBS program
60 Minutes,
asked him if Russians thought capitalism worked, he said yes. “Do you?” Sawyer asked. “Of course I do!”
³
He did not really know about capitalism then, but he knew that communism was not working, and he was aware of the restless public mood.

Overworked, frustrated, and sulking at being passed over for promotion, Yeltsin decided, on September 10, 1987, to quit the Politburo. The last straw was a lecture from Ligachev at a Politburo meeting for tolerating two small unsanctioned demonstrations on Moscow streets. That evening the Moscow boss told Naina he would not work with “this band” any more. He sat down and wrote a letter of resignation to Gorbachev, who was vacationing on the Black Sea.

In the letter, Yeltsin complained that his Politburo colleagues were indifferent to his problems in Moscow and were giving him the cold shoulder. He could no longer tolerate working for Ligachev, whose methods were “altogether unsystematic and crude.” He accused his comrades of paying lip service to perestroika. “This suits them, and—if you will forgive me saying so, Mikhail Sergeyevich—I believe it suits you too.” He finished the communication by asking to be released from his duties as Moscow party chief and candidate Politburo member.

Gorbachev received the letter next morning at his dacha on the Black Sea, where he was working with aides. It came as a thunderbolt. Nobody in Soviet history had ever resigned voluntarily from the ranks of the Politburo. Chernyaev found him in a state of excitement. “Here, read this!” said the party leader. “What is it?” “Read it! Read it!” Chernyaev took the letter and looked through it. “What should I do with this?” asked Gorbachev. Don’t take precipitate action, advised Chernyaev.
⁴
Boldin read the epistle and thought Yeltsin had a point, as “Gorbachev, for whom maneuvering had become a habit, was really taking two steps forward, three to the side and one backward.”
⁵

The general secretary of the Communist Party was confronted with a dilemma. He didn’t like the Moscow dynamo’s “overgrown ambition and lust for power.” Furthermore, a public split in the Politburo could damage the party. At the same time it might strengthen his own hand with the conservatives if they saw how pressure was building up among the most impatient comrades. He called his subordinate in Moscow two days later and begged him, “Wait, Boris, don’t fly off the handle. We’ll work this out.”
⁶
He asked Yeltsin to hold off on his resignation and keep working for another two months, until after the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution (which, because of a later change in the Russian calendar, fell on November 7), when Moscow would be celebrating and the city would be full of foreign dignitaries. Chernyaev recalled his chief saying, “I managed to talk him into it. We agreed that he won’t have an attack of nerves and rush around until after the celebrations.”

Yeltsin remembered the conversation differently. He believed Gorbachev had promised to respond to his letter when he came back from his vacation a few days afterwards. When weeks passed and nothing was said, he figured Gorbachev was quietly planning to make a show of him at a plenum of the Central Committee scheduled for October 21, 1987. This had been convened to hear the text of a groundbreaking speech on Soviet history that the general secretary was working on to commemorate the revolution.

The three hundred members of the Central Committee converged on a raindrenched Kremlin early that day without any sense that a blowup was imminent. They stepped out of their Zils and Chaikas and hurried into the eighteenth century Senate Building. The comrades assembled in St. Catherine Hall, then known as Sverdlov Hall, named after Yakov Sverdlov, the Bolshevik leader who supervised the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Here, in rows of ornate chairs beneath the stony gaze of eighteen prerevolutionary poets portrayed in bas-relief among the white Corinthian columns and pilasters high above, they awaited the single item on the agenda: Gorbachev reading his prepared speech. The fourteen Politburo members sat in a line behind a desk on a raised podium, facing the assembly.