Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (11 page)

Everyone shuffled off to the exits, leaving their wounded prey alone in the room, sick, exhausted, and distraught, his head leaning on the presidium table. The last to leave the hall, Gorbachev glanced back as he crossed the threshold. He returned and put his arm under Yeltsin’s and accompanied him from the room, prompted, Gorbachev’s aide Andrey Grachev suspected, by pangs of conscience. The noble victor helped the vanquished off the field. Korzhakov got him into the car and rushed the stricken Yeltsin back to his hospital bed.

The job of Moscow party boss was given to Lev Zaikov, the Politburo member in charge of military industries, who boasted to Poltoranin, “The Yeltsin epoch is over.”
¹⁰

Gorbachev hadn’t finished with his troublesome protégé. He ordered that a version of the proceedings of the closed Moscow party meeting be published in
Pravda.
This piece of glasnost was clearly designed to display party disapproval of a maverick, in itself previously sufficient to achieve the demolition of a political career. But it backfired. Yeltsin attracted considerable sympathy from Moscow citizens, who believed he really cared about improving their lives. Several hundred students demonstrated at Moscow University, and crude notices appeared in the metro calling for publication of Yeltsin’s secret speech in October.

Yeltsin waited in his hospital bed for a call from his party leader to find out his fate. He expected that he would be banished from Moscow. But that didn’t happen. Perhaps unwilling to act in the old Brezhnev style, or because he felt that his bullheaded stormer still had a useful role to play, possibly even because he thought it was simply the right thing to do, Gorbachev rang the hospital a week later to offer him another job. Korzhakov brought the telephone to his bedside and heard Yeltsin respond “in a totally defeated voice.” Gorbachev suggested that he take the post of first deputy chairman of the state committee for construction. It was a desk job with no policy input, but he would remain a member of the Central Committee. Yeltsin accepted. Anything was better than to be made a pensioner at fifty-six.

Gorbachev had a warning for his adversary, however. “I’ll never let you into politics again,” he told Yeltsin, before putting down the receiver.
¹¹

With the passage of time, some of Gorbachev’s loyalists would complain that keeping his accuser in government was his biggest blunder. The general secretary would protest that he had no hatred or feeling of revenge towards Yeltsin and that despite their power struggles he never lowered himself to his level of “kitchen squabbling.”

(Some years later, after Yeltsin has become president of post-Soviet Russia, he unexpectedly comes across Dmitry Nechayev, the doctor who injected him with drugs so he could be hauled before the Central Committee. He is astonished to learn that he is now personal physician to his prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin. According to Korzhakov in his memoirs, Yeltsin never forgave the doctor. “Naina, unable to contain herself, went to get an explanation from the prime minister. Chernomyrdin acknowledged he had not heard of the doctor’s injection of Yeltsin with baralgin but did not remove him from his service after this unpleasant conversation.”
¹²

On April 7, 1996, the Interfax news agency reports that Nechayev is shot dead at 2 a.m. by an unknown gunman outside the Kremlin hospital on Michurinsky Prospekt. It is one of 216 contract killings in Moscow that year. No one is ever arrested for the crime.)

CHAPTER 8

DECEMBER 25: LATE MORNING

Approaching midday in the White House, Boris Yeltsin takes the podium in the parliamentary chamber and informs the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies that as a consequence of what happened four days ago, the Soviet Union no longer exists and Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev will announce his resignation as Soviet president later in the day.
¹
Immediately afterwards, Gorbachev will sign a decree giving up his command of the Soviet armed forces, and Russia will assume full control of the 27,000 nuclear weapons based in the territories of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

The previous Saturday, Yeltsin and the heads of ten other Soviet republics finalized the creation of a loose, ill-defined alliance, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), to take the place of the Soviet Union on December 31. The ceremony was held in Alma-Ata, the ancient capital of Kazakhstan, almost 2,000 miles southeast of Moscow, and today called Almaty.

He wants now to assure the world through his speech to the deputies that there is no nuclear threat arising from what they are doing. The four nuclear republics, Yeltsin says, have signed a separate agreement, Joint Measures Regarding Nuclear Arms. All Soviet tactical nuclear weapons—short-range missiles carrying low-yield warheads and easy to move—will be transferred to Russia and put in storage within six months. The strategic warheads—intercontinental ballistic missiles on land, planes, and submarines—will be transported to Russian territory over a longer period of time. In the meantime, the four signatories have pledged not to be the first to use nuclear weapons and not to transfer nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices and technologies to any other entity whatsoever.

“There will be only a single nuclear button, and other presidents will not possess it,” Yeltsin declares. Moreover, to “push it” will require the approval of the Russian president and the leaders of the territories with nuclear stockpiles. “Of course, we think this button must never be used.”

The fact that Gorbachev is voluntarily handing over the nuclear communications equipment is, in Yeltsin’s mind, the most significant thing that will happen today after the ratification of the Alma-Ata agreements and Gorbachev’s resignation. It will, of course, make official what is already a reality: The president of the Russian Federation is the person with ultimate power in Moscow. Just as important, it will undermine the case being put about by Gorbachev’s associates that Yeltsin’s actions in breaking up the Soviet Union amount to a coup against the legitimate president.

Though at the time still officially president and commander in chief of the Soviet armed forces, Gorbachev was not invited to give his views to the leaders of those countries that have formed the commonwealth—namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. (The four remaining former republics of the disintegrating USSR—Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Georgia—want nothing to do with the commonwealth and are looking instead to the West for future alliances.) Nor did the gathering of presidents pay any attention to a letter Gorbachev sent them offering to play a role. They have no time for their former overlord now, or for his delusions and conceits.

There is applause for Yeltsin’s announcement to the Russian congress. He has many opponents in the assembly, some of them staunch communists, some vociferous critics like his own vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, who deeply regret the demise of the great superpower in which they were born, but everyone realizes that a point has been reached where practically every single republic believes it will be better off on its own.

Vladimir Isakov from Yekaterinburg, one of the few Russian parliamentarians who openly supported the failed putsch in August, is among the small minority who voice opposition to the agreement. He rises on a point of order. He points out that when Yeltsin was elected president of Russia, he swore an oath to the constitution of the Soviet-era Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). He has now “high-handedly violated it.” Yeltsin signed the documents in Alma-Ata as the president of the Russian Federation, but it is still legally the RSFSR, he protests. Therefore the agreement is illegal.

There is consternation. Yeltsin and his followers ceased using the Soviet title after the coup but had not got around to formally altering the name. They look completely nonplussed and a brief silence falls until the dilemma is solved by the parliament’s speaker. “Well, before the president answers the question, how about we change the name now?” suggests Ruslan Khasbulatov, an academic of Chechen descent who made his name by bravely defending the White House at Yeltsin’s side in August. “A congress will later establish whether it indeed conforms to the text of the new constitution.”

Khasbulatov proposes a motion changing the title of the assembly to which they were elected from the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation (Russia). The measure is carried on a roll-call vote.
Izvestia’s
reporter Ivan Yelistratov, watching from the gallery, sees only two votes against.

The deputies in the hall burst into applause as the Soviet republic created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 as the biggest and most powerful constituent member of the USSR, an enormous territory consisting of 6,592,800 square miles and covering more than a ninth of the earth’s land surface, ceases to exist as a legal entity. Other republics of the Soviet Union have already made similar changes in their designations, but the Russian Federation is the last to dump socialism from its official title. Shortly afterwards an excited newsreader on Radio Moscow reports that the removal of the words “Soviet” and “Socialist” reflects the official demise of the Soviet Union.

Yeltsin has another cause for satisfaction this day. Outside the chamber several deputies rush to a conference room after hearing that a “sensational” press conference—as a reporter from
Sovetskaya Rossiya
describes it—is being given by an expert from a parliamentary commission investigating the August coup. The expert, Alexander Kichikhin, confirms what everyone suspected: Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the tiny Liberal Democratic Party, who often rambles round the White House corridors showering listeners with spittle during half-crazed rants about the evils of Russia’s enemies, ranging from Jews to the CIA, is a stooge of the KGB.
²
His phony party has no branches and was recruited solely to oppose Boris Yeltsin in Russia’s first ever presidential election in June. To Yeltsin’s satisfaction Zhirinovsky had got only 8 percent of the vote, despite the support of much of the official media.

The Russian president returns to his fifth-floor cabinet and wolfs down a quick lunch. He regularly has meat pies and apples delivered from the self-service cafeteria. Out of his window he can see the wide Moscow river as it begins a loop southwest like a horseshoe, past the Kievsky Railway Station, around Luzhniki sports stadium, back northeast by Gorky Park, and around the ramparts of the Kremlin two miles distant, where Mikhail Gorbachev is also grabbing a quick lunch and fighting fatigue and the onset of influenza as he prepares for the speech that will mark his transition from presidential to civilian life.

Yeltsin will take Gorbachev’s place there behind the Kremlin’s high, red-brick walls, completing the remarkable resurrection that began four years ago, when he was left a broken man, physically and psychologically, and demoted from Moscow party chief to the junior post of first deputy chairman of the state committee for construction.

CHAPTER 9

BACK FROM THE DEAD

Mikhail Gorbachev’s warning to Boris Yeltsin in November 1987 that he would never let him into politics again left the former Moscow party chief with a sense of despair. He felt that “where my heart had been was a burnt-out cinder.”

Nevertheless, Gorbachev had given him a secure job in Moscow as first deputy chairman of the state committee for construction and allowed him to remain a member of the Central Committee, when he could have banished him to the provinces and gotten rid of him once and for all.

Yeltsin surmised sourly that if Gorbachev didn’t have a Yeltsin he would have to invent one. However much Gorbachev disliked him, Yeltsin was useful to the general secretary, who could play the role of wise, omniscient hero pitted against “Ligachev who plays the villain” on one side and, on the other, Yeltsin “the bully boy, the madcap radical.”

Gorbachev also had to protect his own reputation as a reformer. It would not have enhanced his growing standing abroad as an enlightened progressive if he had treated his political opponent in the old way. He had to show that he could be magnanimous even to an irresponsible wrecker who he was sure could not rise above street-level politicking.

Yeltsin spent several weeks in the hospital before being discharged. At home he endured crushing headaches and deep depression. “I felt like crawling up the wall, and could hardly restrain myself from crying out loud. It was like the tortures of hell.”
¹
He couldn’t sleep and vented his feelings of rage on his family.

He began work in the state construction ministry in Pushkin Street on January 8, 1988, a mild day with snow drifting down in large flakes, arriving in a Zil with four KGB bodyguards, as he was still a candidate member of the Politburo. He was formally relieved of this post by the Central Committee on Thursday, February 17, and that evening had to go home from work in a mid-sized Chaika, without a security escort. The demotion was automatic but left him terribly distressed. According to his assistant Lev Sukhanov, it plunged him into psychological turmoil, and the inner conflict between the two sides of his character, the party boss and the rebel, began to tear him apart.

While Yeltsin was allowed to keep his apartment at 54 Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street, he had to move his belongings from Moskva-reka-5 dacha in Usovo to a more cramped country home. His security agents from the KGB’s Ninth Directorate were removed. One of them, Alexander Korzhakov, volunteered to stay on as a personal bodyguard and was consequently fired by the KGB. He was soon earning ten times more than he had been before. Korzhakov was taken on as a ghost employee by three sympathetic businessmen who were running cooperative enterprises that had been permitted to operate under perestroika. He did nothing except call round to each once a month to collect his “salary.” Korzhakov’s act of loyalty to Yeltsin marked the start of an intense friendship that saw the two men play tennis together and stay up drinking late at night. They became so close that they exchanged blood from their fingers, twice, to pledge eternal loyalty as “blood brothers.”