Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (20 page)

The Russian populist returned home chastened by the “terrible blow” of Western reaction. But there was a surprise in store for him. Gorbachev invited him to a meeting of the heads of all the Soviet Union’s republics at a dacha in the outskirts of Moscow, and what the Soviet leader had to say to him there, Yeltsin found, “exceeded all my expectations.”

CHAPTER 14

DECEMBER 25: MIDAFTERNOON

By three o’clock in the afternoon of December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev is able at last to relax. Everything is ready. There is nothing more to be done in preparation for his farewell address. Ted Koppel and Rick Kaplan are brought in to the office to film more presidential thoughts for their ABC documentary. Anatoly Chernyaev and Andrey Grachev are there too.

One of the white telephones on the desk rings, and Gorbachev picks up the receiver. It is his wife calling from the presidential dacha. This is not unusual. Raisa has long been in the habit of ringing her husband or his officials to involve herself in events. But this time it is different. She is in great distress.

The president makes a signal to the Americans that this is a private matter. “He got a call from Raisa,” Rick Kaplan would recall. “We were ordered to leave the room.”

Raisa is in tears. She tells her husband in considerable agitation that several of Yeltsin’s security men have arrived at their dacha to serve them notice to quit. They have also ordered the family to evacuate the president’s city apartment at Kosygin Street on Lenin Hills within two hours. The men said they had been authorized to take this action by a decree, signed by the president of Russia that morning, privatizing the apartment. They have orders “to remove her personal belongings from the premises of the government representative”—the bureaucratic term for the president’s official residences. The unwelcome visitors have already started moving some of the Gorbachevs’ family belongings out of the mansion.
¹

Gorbachev is livid over the impudence and lack of courtesy Yeltsin’s security staff are showing his wife. It was only decided two days ago that he would discontinue his activities as president of the Soviet Union this evening, and there has been no time to prepare for moving. Moreover, he was specifically given by Yeltsin a grace period of three more days after his resignation to vacate the country residence and the presidential apartment. He does not even know if he will have the services of the Ninth Department of the KGB to provide a crew for packing and transport. The unit has been renamed and has come under Yeltsin’s control.

Previously he could always rely on Colonel Vladimir Redkoborody to protect them from any intrusions, but the former KGB intelligence officer, who was last week responsible for the security of both presidents, is now answerable only to Yeltsin.

This “especially vindictive act” against Raisa strikes Chernyaev as a boorish effort by Yeltsin to make the final day miserable for both Gorbachev and his wife. Grachev, too, is outraged. “Can you imagine? He was still acting president!”
²

Gorbachev tries to calm Raisa and promises to sort things out right away. Red blotches appear on the president’s cheeks as his fury mounts. He starts making angry calls, cursing and swearing as he demands to speak to the security officials responsible. He eventually gets Colonel Redkoborody on the line. “You’re really out of line and you’d better straighten up,” Gorbachev cries, lacing his words with profanities. “You’re talking about somebody’s home here. Do I have to report all this to the press? Please, what are you doing? Stop this madness.”

Redkoborody blusters and promises to talk to the security men. He blames excessive zeal at lower levels but at the same time mentions he has orders from higher up. Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, later discloses that the command came directly from his boss, who ordered him to mount a campaign of daily harassment of Gorbachev’s staff at the dacha so he could move in right away. Korzhakov sees his task as making life difficult for the Gorbachevs but finds that they are not in any rush to leave.

Gorbachev’s anger has some effect. After his heated conversation with Redkoborody, he is given more time to evacuate the dacha. But Yeltsin’s security men have also arrived at the Gorbachevs’ state apartment in Lenin Hills, where they are now rummaging around and removing their personal effects. “Everything had to be done in a rush,” Gorbachev complains, after finding the mess the next day. “We were forced to move to different lodgings within twenty-four hours. I saw the results in the morning—heaps of clothes, books, dishes, folders, newspapers, letters, and God knows what lying strewn on the floor.”

Yeltsin has as little respect for Raisa’s feelings as he has for Gorbachev’s. Raisa was hostile to him from the start, he believes, and this played a role in her husband’s attitude towards him. Yeltsin was among the first to criticize Raisa’s high profile as Gorbachev’s wife, complaining that “she unfortunately is unaware how keenly and jealously millions of Soviet people follow her appearances in the media.” When he began highlighting Gorbachev’s privileges as Communist Party chief, Yeltsin blamed Raisa for encouraging his expensive tastes. “He likes to live well, in comfort and luxury,” he noted. “In this he is helped by his wife.” Yeltsin once tackled Gorbachev to his face at a Politburo meeting about Raisa’s “interference.”
³
This impertinence deepened the rift between them.

Slight and always elegantly dressed, Raisa is admired and envied by members of the Russian intelligentsia, and by quite a few ordinary Russians, as the first Soviet leader’s wife to show a sophisticated and humanizing face to the world.
⁴
She swept away the image of politburo wives as tongue-tied women whose qualification, it was said, was to be heavier than their husbands. Anatoly Sobchak’s wife, Lyudmila, thought that while she lectured people like a schoolteacher, Raisa was “the first woman who dared to violate the Asiatic custom where the wife sits at home and doesn’t show her face.”
⁵
Chernyaev thought she made the Gorbachevs look like “normal people” in the West. Gorbachev would say in later years that taking his educated, energetic wife with him on trips was a second revolution in addition to perestroika.

No leader’s spouse had played a public role in Soviet life before, except Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, who was a revolutionary and a member of the Politburo in her own right. Yeltsin trumpeted to aides that Raisa had no business going with Gorbachev on foreign trips and playing a high-profile role on the international stage. When U.S. ambassador Jack Matlock inquired of the Russian leader if he intended bringing Naina on a trip to the United States, he retorted, “No. Absolutely not! I’ll not have her acting like Raisa Maximovna!” It might be acceptable in a rich, prosperous, and contented society but “not in our country, at least not at this time.” Gorbachev had caused a rumpus years earlier when he told NBC’s Tom Brokaw that he discussed everything, including national affairs at the highest level, with his wife. As far as Yeltsin was concerned, Raisa’s influence had an adverse effect on Gorbachev’s attitude towards people, towards staff appointments, and towards politics in general, and that she was “standoffish and [put] on airs.”

There have been several instances of Raisa taking an interest in affairs of state. Most criticism was aired in private but at the Congress of People’s Deputies a delegate from Kharkov once told an outraged Gorbachev from the podium that he was incapable of escaping the “vindictiveness and influence” of his wife. On one occasion she took it upon herself to explain to Fyodor Burlatsky, editor of
Literaturnaya Gazeta,
that the people were not ready for the market. Gorbachev’s wife is still dabbling in policy matters in the final months of the Soviet Union. Congress Speaker Ivan Laptiev complained to Rodric Braithwaite that he was rung by Raisa and it was forty-five minutes before he could get off the phone, leading the British ambassador to conclude that Gorbachev couldn’t get a word in edgewise at home.
⁶

Raisa was seen as rather frosty by the tradition-bound Kremlin wives, whom she in turn found to be “full of arrogance, suspicion, sycophancy and tactlessness.” Korzhakov claimed in his tell-all memoirs that Raisa once ordered—in front of his subordinates—the head of the KGB security department, General Plekhanov, who later became one of the August coup participants, to move a heavy bronze lamp standard. “When I heard that, I thought, that’s why he betrayed Gorbachev.”

By contrast, Yeltsin boasted that he never discussed work with his family. If his wife and daughters bombarded him with questions about the events of the day when he came home from work, he would tell them to be quiet, saying, “I don’t need politics at home.” Naina concurred in a comment she once made to Novosti news agency: “He didn’t like it when someone began discussing political or economic issues at home. That is why we refrained from giving him advice, although we were certainly concerned over the situation in the country and wanted it to improve fast.” If she voiced an opinion he didn’t like, Yeltsin would tease Naina, a qualified sanitary engineer, by saying, “Just concern yourself with the plumbing!” She would retort, “If there was no plumbing, where would you go?”
⁷

The novelty of dealing with Raisa created a problem for the Soviet media. The liberal head of Soviet television from 1989 to 1990, Mikhail Nenashev, said she spoiled the mood of everyone when involved in a program. He perceived her as unhealthily ambitious, and he resented having to broadcast her speeches, which, like those of most spouses in her position, were often filled with empty banalities. If he cut them back, Gorbachev’s aides gave him a hard time. Her favorite correspondent, Sergey Lomakin, believed Raisa did a lot of good, such as recruiting musicians and doctors she met abroad to come to Russia. But from the beginning Yegor Ligachev warned Gorbachev about the negative effect of her overexposure on television, and even the submissive Kravchenko, who succeeded Nenashev, told Gorbachev that the shorter any item about her on television, the better. When Gorbachev protested in a pained way that other world leaders traveled with their wives, Kravchenko responded that as a rule they didn’t make declarations on television.
⁸

Gorbachev knew well from the start that some people made negative comments at seeing Raisa by his side, such as, “Who does she think she is, a member of the Politburo?” Nevertheless he valued her both as a close companion and as a considerable political asset on his international travels. When he made a speech to French legislators in Paris on one of his first visits abroad, he glanced at Raisa in the audience and gave her what
Paris Match
described as a look full of tenderness. She made a stunning impression in London in 1984, when she appeared at an evening function in a stylish white satin dress and gold lame sandals with chain straps, and held forth on English literature with British ministers. In Washington she discussed world affairs with prominent American women at the Washington home of socialite Pamela Harrison.
Woman’s Own
magazine in the United Kingdom made her “Woman of the Year” in 1987.

The masses inevitably resented her celebrity. The Russian women who endured harsh living conditions and had no access to haute couture disliked her as much as the Russian men reared in the domestic tradition of
domostroi,
the practice dating back to Ivan the Terrible under which husbands dominated and wives obeyed. Her elegance was a reminder of the existence of special shops with luxury clothes that were inaccessible to ordinary citizens. She became the subject of frequent gossip. Gorbachev complained in his memoirs that she supposedly went shopping with an American Express card when they didn’t know what an American Express card was, and that she allegedly spent large sums on fashion to compete with Nancy Reagan when all her clothes were made by seamstress Tamara Makeeva in Moscow. He raged in particular about Yeltsin spreading the “lie” that he and Raisa had use of a gold credit card as a Politburo member. “It was a disgrace to read all this nonsense.”
⁹

This story originated in the Western media. On June 6, 1988,
Time
magazine reported that after admiring Margaret Thatcher’s diamond earrings on a trip to London four years earlier, Raisa “dropped into Cartier on New Bond Street to buy a pair ($1,780) for herself, paying with the American Express card.”
Time
also claimed she owned four fur coats and wore three of them in one day in Washington, and it made the unlikely allegation that Mikhail Gorbachev was once overheard quipping, “That woman costs me not only a lot of money but also a lot of worry.”

Raisa was deeply offended by the many articles about her in Russia and abroad in which “accuracy was totally absent, and invention, myths and even slander became the ‘basis’ of what was written.... If it had not been for my name appearing in the text I would never have believed they were writing about me.” Gorbachev blamed Western “centers of psychological warfare” out to undermine him and “political riff-raff’ in Russia who stirred up a campaign of innuendo against Raisa to discredit his reforms.

Much was also made in the American media of a cold war between Raisa and Nancy Reagan, wife of President Reagan. The former actress found the Marxist-Leninist lady hard going. “She never stopped talking, or lecturing to be more accurate.” Nancy was taken aback when Raisa “snapped her fingers to summon her KGB guards” to get a different chair. “I couldn’t believe it. I had met first ladies, princesses and queens, but I had never seen anybody act this way.”
¹⁰

Raisa developed a much warmer relationship with Barbara Bush, though George Bush had difficulty appreciating her deadpan humor. At a dinner in the Soviet embassy in Washington, the U.S. president joked to Raisa, as they were being entertained by a very overweight and unpretty Russian opera singer, “I think I’m falling in love.” “You’d better not,” she scolded him. “Remember Gary Hart!” Bush concluded that she had been briefed on the scandal surrounding the former senator and presidential candidate and that she was not kidding.
¹¹
Bush invited Jane Fonda, Van Cliburn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Dizzy Gillespie, and other celebrities to a lunch in the White House after the Soviet embassy made it known Raisa wanted to meet stars of show business.