The Last Empire (64 page)

A few days later, James Baker took time to draft a personal letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, paying tribute to his accomplishments. In it he all but recognized Gorbachev's leadership in ending the Cold War. “You
saw the folly in superpower competition and in the isolation of your country from the rest of the world,” wrote Baker in his “Dear Mikhail” letter.

Your speech to the United Nations in 1988 ushered in a new era in world politics. With every step you took, you asked the United States to join you to build a new world. We were ready to do so and to build a new partnership between our nations as well. And we did that in a remarkable way—in Afghanistan, Central America, Cambodia, Namibia, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. In addition, we cooperated not just to control arms, but to eliminate them. And to bring the risk of nuclear war to its lowest point since such arms were invented. Most importantly, together we saw the map of Europe transformed—peacefully and democratically. We saw Germany united and the people of Central and Eastern Europe set free to determine their own future. And as I said on many occasions, none of this would have happened without your leadership. Your place in history will forever be secure.
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EARLY IN THE MORNING
on Friday, December 27, Kremlin custodians came to Gorbachev's office on the third floor of the Senate Building to change the sign on the door from “President of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev Mikhail Sergeevich” to “President of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin Boris Nikolaevich.” Soon after 8:00 a.m. Yeltsin himself showed up at the threshold of the coveted office in the company of his chief adviser, Gennadii Burbulis; the head of the Russian parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov; and his propaganda and information chief, Mikhail Poltoranin. What happened then we know of from the largely secondhand accounts of Gorbachev's supporters.

Yeltsin entered Gorbachev's office in a manner that left no doubt who was in charge. “Well, show it to me,” he told the secretary on duty. His glance then fell on the desk, where he believed something was missing. “There used to be a marble desk set here,” he said to the secretary. “Where is it?” The terrified public servant explained in a trembling voice that Gorbachev had never used ink pens and preferred felt ones, so there had never been an ink set on his desk. “Well, all right,” said Yeltsin, dropping the matter, “and what's over there?” He
walked into the inner sanctum that former general secretaries and the Soviet president had used for relaxation. Once there, Yeltsin began to pull drawers out of a desk. One of them happened to be locked. He demanded the keys. It took a while before the right custodian was located. Finally, extra keys were found and the drawer unlocked. It was empty. “Well, all right,” said the disappointed Yeltsin. He then returned to the office, where he and his entourage sat around a conference table and opened a bottle of whiskey to celebrate the takeover of the last remaining fortress on their enemy's territory. It was 8:30 a.m. in the morning. Several minutes later the victors left the conquered and now appropriately marked territory in a good mood, laughing. The departing Yeltsin told the still shocked secretary, “Look at me! I'll come back later today!” Indeed he did, returning to sign a number of decrees in the presence of the media.
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“This was the triumph of plunderers—I can find no other word for it,” wrote the appalled Gorbachev in his memoirs. He learned of the invasion from a secretary who called to tell him what was going on in the Kremlin. According to his earlier agreement with Yeltsin, the president of the USSR could use his office until Sunday evening. But as far as Yeltsin was concerned, the deal was off. The Russian president simply could not wait to move into the office historically associated with supreme power in the country. On Monday, December 30, he had to be in Minsk at the first working summit of the leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States. He wanted Gorbachev out before then. “Long farewells make for too many tears,” he wrote later.
²⁴

By the time Gorbachev entered the Senate Building that day, the whiskey party was over. He was mortified. He had scheduled an interview with Japanese journalists for that morning, and now he had to look for a different office. His old one still featured a red flag in the corner, but it was no longer his. The humiliated ex-president gave the interview in the office of his former chief of staff. Anatolii Cherniaev, who described in his diary the takeover of Gorbachev's last refuge, was appalled by Yeltsin's behavior, but he was also less than kind to Gorbachev. “Why humiliate oneself that way; why does he ‘go' to the Kremlin? . . . The flag has already been changed above the cupola of the Sverdlovsk Hall [[the Catherine Hall in the Senate Building]], and he is no longer president! A nightmare! And that one [[Yeltsin]] is more and more of a boor. He tramples ever more rudely.”
²⁵

Yeltsin indeed seemed unable to control his desire for revenge—this despite his solemn promises to Bush and Baker that he would treat his rival with dignity. He began his attack even before Gorbachev completed his resignation speech. In the afternoon of December 25, as Gorbachev was putting the finishing touches to the text of his address, he received a disturbing call from home. The panic-stricken Raisa Gorbacheva was calling her husband to inform him that Kremlin officials had shown up at their Moscow apartment, demanding that it be vacated in two hours. This was a breach of every agreement Gorbachev had made with Yeltsin a few days earlier. Gorbachev had agreed to move to a smaller apartment, but not before he formally left office. The transition period they had come to terms on was to last into the New Year, and a bit of civility, not to say leniency, could well be expected even after that. But now his family was being evicted even before he signed his resignation papers! Gorbachev was furious. According to Anatolii Cherniaev, who was present when Raisa Gorbacheva called her husband, the president “flew into a rage; his face went red; he made one phone call, then another, and let loose a stream of curses.” Yeltsin's officials backed down, and the move was postponed until the following day. Gorbachev was free to speak with Bush and then deliver his address.
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The next morning Gorbachev, who had returned home late after the ad hoc farewell party with his aides, had to deal with the reality of the unexpected move. He later described the scene at home: “Heaps of clothes, books, dishes, folders, newspapers, letters, and God knows what lying strewn on the floor.” When Gorbachev came to work at the Kremlin that day, he looked depressed. It took a while before his security detail managed to get a limousine to bring him to the Kremlin—the car that Yeltsin had allowed him to keep as part of the deal made the previous Monday. It was also next to impossible to get a truck to move their belongings from the apartment. Gorbachev's daughter, Irina, recalled that he wanted to call Yeltsin and protest the actions of his underlings. “After all, we agreed with him on everything like decent people!” he told his family. But Raisa Gorbacheva was against it. “There is no need to phone anyone or ask anyone for anything. Better to die with Irina, but we will pack up and move. People will help us.”
²⁷

Raisa and Irina Gorbachev packed the family belongings with the assistance of the bodyguards who had protected them at Foros. After
their Crimean imprisonment, they were prepared for the worst: Raisa had burned her personal correspondence with Mikhail, and Irina, her diaries. “After all, we had been living the whole most recent period as if in someone else's house,” recalled Irina, thinking of the months leading up to Gorbachev's resignation. “Everything hung by a slender thread. We did not know which of the powers that be—the KGB or the democrats—would break into it.” Raisa now took special care in packing the books she had kept on the shelves in alphabetical order by author. Among them were gift books from Margaret Thatcher and a volume of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, adored by her father. In her book
I Hope,
released in the United States only a few months earlier, Raisa quoted lines from Shevchenko that now seemed particularly appropriate to the occasion and were cited in that context by Conor O'Clery in his book about the last day of Gorbachev's presidency: “My thoughts, my thoughts, what pain you bring! Why do you rise at me in such gloomy rows?”
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Gorbachev had every reason to be appalled by the harassment to which he and his family were subjected by Yeltsin's subordinates. But this was not so different from the treatment that the old regime had reserved for its former officials. Those who vacated positions at the top of the Soviet power pyramid never did so of their own volition—they either died in office or were removed in disgrace. That tradition continued into the Gorbachev period. Aleksandr Yakovlev recalled in amazement the breathtaking speed with which his privileges as a member of the Politburo were taken away once he was removed from office with Gorbachev's approval: “As soon as I was elected to the Politburo, I was driven home in another car with my bodyguards, but no sooner had Gorbachev accepted my resignation than the car was taken away, and I was told to leave the dacha by 11:00 the next morning.”
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The brutal haste with which Yeltsin took over Gorbachev's office and had his family evicted from their living quarters became known in Moscow, casting Yeltsin and his team in a negative light. In his memoirs, Yeltsin took issue with “rumors circulated by the press that we literally threw the former general secretary's possessions out of his Kremlin office.” He claimed that the Gorbachevs were given sufficient time to move to their new quarters and blamed possible excesses on friction between clerks, “inevitable” under the circumstances. One of those “clerks,” Yeltsin's chief bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov, recalled
telling Gorbachev's bodyguards on an almost daily basis to remind their boss of the need to vacate his country house. The reason, according to Korzhakov, was quite simple. Barvikha-4, as Gorbachev's country dwelling was known to security personnel, was the only government residence outside Moscow that had all the communications equipment required to house the leader of the country and the commander in chief of its armed forces. “There were no [[other]] buildings of that kind near Moscow,” recalled Korzhakov.
³⁰

Sooner or later the president of the USSR indeed had to be “evacuated” from the government facilities he occupied, but Yeltsin went out of his way to make the process as painful as possible for Gorbachev and his family. Did he want the Gorbachevs to experience at least part of the pain that he and his wife, Naina, had felt when they were harassed by Gorbachev and his men? In November 1987, when Yeltsin was recovering in a Moscow clinic after his defeat at a Politburo meeting and a botched suicide attempt, Gorbachev sent KGB bodyguards to drag him out of his hospital bed to a meeting of the Moscow city party committee, which would remove him from his post as first committee secretary. Yeltsin told Gorbachev that he could not walk without assistance, but the general secretary dismissed his protests, as he did those of his minister of health, who pointed out the seriousness of Yeltsin's condition. When guards came to the hospital to escort Yeltsin, who had just been injected with powerful analgesic and antispasmodic medicine, the desperate Naina Yeltsina told them that they were behaving like Nazis. She wanted them to tell Gorbachev that he was a criminal.
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The drama of Mikhail Gorbachev's last days in office exposed with brutal clarity the depth of distrust and sheer hatred that had existed between him and his nemesis, Boris Yeltsin. But the significance of their personal conflict should be kept in proper perspective. In the end, it was not up to Gorbachev and Yeltsin alone to decide whether the Soviet Union would live or die. The real conflict was between the emerging institutions of independent Russia and the other Soviet republics. With Ukraine leaving the Union no matter what, Yeltsin and his aides faced the choice of either continuing to carry the imperial burden on their own or quitting the empire. They decided to do the latter. The personal rivalry between Gorbachev and Yeltsin sped up the process.

EPILOGUE

“M
R. SPEAKER! THE PRESIDENT
of the United States!” announced the House sergeant at arms at the top of his voice, and the chamber of the House of Representatives exploded in applause. A slim six-foot-two man in a gray suit, sporting a blue-gray striped tie, somewhat narrow by today's standards, appeared in the doorway. Escorted by select members of the House and Senate, he began to make his way to the House clerk's desk. Smiling, he shook hands, exchanged greetings, and from time to time pointed his finger at congressmen, senators, and members of government who were eager to catch a glimpse of him and speak a word or two. They applauded him long after he reached the clerk's desk. The man at the center of attention was clearly pleased. He had promised his audience that this day he would speak about “big things,” “big changes,” and “big problems.” He kept his promise.

It was a few minutes past 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday, January 28, 1992. President George H. W. Bush was about to deliver his third and, as anticipated by the press, most important State of the Union address, with millions of Americans in the television audience. He was expected not only to reflect on one of the most extraordinary years in his presidency and the whole post–World War II history of his country but also to sketch out policies for the future of that country and the world. When the applause finally subsided, Bush told the audience, “You know, with the big buildup this address has had,
I wanted to make sure it would be a big hit, but I couldn't convince Barbara to deliver it for me.” The chamber again exploded in applause, with members of the joint session of Congress rising to their feet.