Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (21 page)

Raisa broke new ground by becoming the first Soviet leader’s wife to engage in charitable work. She notably donated $100,000 in royalties from her husband’s books in 1990 to improve Russia’s treatment of childhood leukemia, and she became an active patron of a children’s hospital in Moscow. But she always maintained a reserve about her private life and endured the negative press in dignified silence. “Why should I talk about myself?” she told family friend Georgy Pryakhin, who was engaged to record a series of conversations with her for a short, sentimental book called
I Hope.
“I am not a film star or a writer or an artist or a musician or a fashion designer. And I am not a politician.... I am the wife of the head of the Soviet state, supporting my husband as far as I can and helping him as I have always done ever since our young days when we linked our lives together.”
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The book has just been published and no doubt has come to the attention of the Russian president, which goes some way to explaining his harsh actions towards her just when her husband is about to resign. Without naming him, she singles out Yeltsin and his acolytes for particular scorn in its pages. They are party men who for thirty years expounded the merits of “barrack-room socialism” and were in charge of building society, and then announced that “they will gladly destroy it all and set about its destruction.” She is scathing about how easily some former comrades have changed their coats and how “yesterday’s energetic propagandist for atheism today vows eternal loyalty to Christian dogmas.”
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Valery Boldin would later characterize Raisa as tough, harsh, domineering, and fussy, an imperious first lady who delivered barbs and humiliating lectures to those working for her. According to him she had no qualms about issuing orders over the phone to the general secretary’s aides and to several members of the government. He seemed to enjoy her company at times, however, and related how they shared the pleasure of surreptitiously sipping red wine together on an international flight at the height of the anti-alcohol campaign. But he wrote that he recoiled when on the same flight she tried to order Gorbachev’s aides, whose allegiance was first and foremost to the party, to swear an oath of loyalty to her husband. They all declined.

In the opinion of the president’s interpreter, Pavel Palazchenko, who helped her with the English-language edition of
I Hope,
Raisa is not at all the aloof and didactic woman she often seems on television but is an authentic person. Georgy Shakhnazarov believes Gorbachev would have benefited if he had listened to her advice more often, and that Raisa fulfilled her mission honorably and set a precedent for future spouses of Russian leaders.

Gorbachev’s distress at Yeltsin’s treatment of his wife on their last day as the Soviet Union’s first couple is deepened by his knowledge of a truth they have obscured from the world, that Raisa is at the end of her tether. The drama of their life is something that “ultimately she is not able to bear.” He acknowledges in time that she is a vulnerable person. “She was strong, but she had to endure a great deal.”
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Only two decades later does he disclose how ill she is at the time. After the August coup “she had a massive fit, or rather a micro stroke,” he tells the newspaper
Novaya Gazeta.
“Then she had a hemorrhage in both eyes. Her eyesight deteriorated dramatically. And the incredible stress continued.”
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Gorbachev calls Raisa back and assures her that no one will intrude further into their state dacha that day. Still red in the face with anger after he replaces the receiver, he laments to his colleagues, “What a disgrace! Can you imagine, it was the living space for the family for seven years. We have several hundred if not thousands of books there. We would need time to pack them all.” He has little but contempt for the people around Yeltsin and for those who denounced the communists for their system of privileges and are now jostling each other “like hogs at a trough.”

The eviction orders, delivered even before he has stepped down, make it clear to Gorbachev that he can no longer trust Yeltsin to honor the commitments in the transition package negotiated between them two days ago. He has to be prepared for more humiliations before the day is out.

It takes some minutes for him to calm down over the action of “those jerks” and turn his mind again to the farewell address he is to give in three and a half hours. When he recovers his composure, Gorbachev turns to Grachev and says, “You know, Andrey, the fact that they’re acting this way makes me certain that I am right.”
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CHAPTER 15

HIJACKING BARBARA BUSH

After the debacle in the Baltics in January 1991, Gorbachev realized he had to compromise with the republics if he was to have any chance of saving the Soviet Union. Force would not work. It only fueled nationalist sentiment, went against his nature, and threatened to destroy his legacy as a democratic reformer—not to mention slamming the door on the billions of dollars in international credits he was seeking to restructure the economy.

Therefore he invited Yeltsin and the leaders of the other fourteen Soviet republics to meet him on April 23 at Novo-Ogarevo, an estate with several fine buildings set in a pine grove high on the banks of the Moscow River. The aim would be to discuss a future union with more power devolved to the republics. Nine of them accepted his invitation, including Yeltsin.

The “nine plus one” group—nine republic leaders plus Gorbachev—gathered in a second-floor room of a reception house constructed in the style of a nineteenth-century manor. Gorbachev sat at the top of a long table on which were placed four slim microphones to amplify his voice. Behind him the Soviet flag hung from a twelve-foot-high stand, and a heavily bearded Karl Marx observed the proceedings from a portrait on the wall over Gorbachev’s shoulder. The Soviet president was in a conciliatory mood. He said that he was ready to sign a draft union treaty giving real sovereignty to the republics, and that after a new Soviet constitution was adopted, he would dissolve the Congress of People’s Deputies and hold direct elections for the post of Soviet president.

Now in a position to make, rather than demand, concessions, Yeltsin responded in kind and dropped his insistence on full Russian sovereignty—which he was as yet unable to implement in any case. After a daylong discussion, Gorbachev dictated a statement, which the nine presidents signed, noting that they were all prepared to work together on a new union treaty. They retired for dinner and toasts to a new beginning. For Gorbachev it was a load off his mind, “and a glimmer of hope emerged.” Yeltsin felt “warmed and excited” after the lengthy session.

Nevertheless, the new civility between Gorbachev and Yeltsin did not extend beyond the drawing rooms and lawns of Novo-Ogarevo. Yeltsin’s political ambitions were soaring. To no one’s surprise, he announced that he would run for president of the Russian republic in the groundbreaking election for which he had got a mandate on the back of Gorbachev’s referendum. Gorbachev professed to be neutral but took steps to undermine Yeltsin’s chances. Oleg Shenin, a Central Committee secretary, claimed that Gorbachev, who often referred to Yeltsin as “unbalanced,” repeatedly gave him an assignment to locate some documentation about Yeltsin’s health. During the campaign the KGB provided Gorbachev with transcripts of Yeltsin’s conversations with his security chief, Alexander Korzhakov, at a Moscow tennis club. The pleasant lady at the club who insisted on giving them postmatch refreshments in her office ensured that they lingered within range of the KGB microphones installed there.

Yeltsin realized that without access to television he was at a disadvantage compared to a candidate with the backing of Gorbachev’s Kremlin. Of all the republics, Russia was the only one without its own television channel. In those days Soviet television had two channels, Channel 1 for news and major events and Channel 2 for sports and cultural and educational programs. Both were broadcast throughout the Soviet Union. As the campaign got under way, the Russian parliament pressured Kravchenko to cede control of Channel 2 to the Russian government. The television chief gave in, for once without consulting Gorbachev. The president was furious and raged at Kravchenko, “How dare you help my opponents like this!”
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Gorbachev correctly saw that a Russian channel would not only help Yeltsin but become a propaganda tool against him. It went on air under its new masters on May 13, 1991, with fast-paced news and satirical sketches, including one of an old woman singing a song with the words “Gorbachev first banned vodka. Now he is banning food.”
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In advance of the June election Yeltsin chose as his running mate Alexander Rutskoy, a former combat pilot and Afghan War hero whom he described as a real tiger, a macho man who would make middle-aged matrons swoon with delight. His only problem with the deputy was that he used expletives all the time, something Yeltsin abhorred. The straight-laced provincial was intolerant of the bad habits of others. Yeltsin also detested smoking and would take a cigarette from the fingers of a smoker sitting near him—on one occasion it was Hannelore Kohl, the wife of Chancellor Kohl of Germany
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—and stub it out.

His principal opponent was Nikolay Ryzhkov, but the humorless bureaucrat had only a record of failed economic reforms to show. The ebullient mood of the Yeltsin campaign was conveyed in an anecdote about a military helicopter pilot saying, “Welcome aboard, future president of Russia,” and Yeltsin replying, “Thank you, future general!”

Yeltsin won handily with his platform of radical economic reform and privatization in a more sovereign Russia. He received forty-six million votes compared to thirteen million for Ryzhkov and six million for the extreme nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Gorbachev’s preferred runner, Vadim Bakatin, got fewer than three million votes. Yeltsin believed he won because the other candidates represented the old failed order while he embodied a yet nonexistent country that everyone was waiting impatiently to appear. He had also shown that it was possible to be a Russian patriot while supporting greater freedom for the other republics. Their common enemy was the center, representing Soviet imperialism. And at the heart of the center was Gorbachev.

The inauguration of President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin as the first freely elected leader in Russia’s thousand-year history took place on July 10, 1991, in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, beneath a giant replica of a double-headed eagle. The pompous ceremony was designed to evoke the color and majesty of prerevolutionary Russia and boost Yeltsin’s national credentials and his political legitimacy. President Gorbachev was in attendance as the red RSFSR flag, with hammer and sickle and blue stripe, was hoisted into the azure summer sky over the building. When Yeltsin made his appearance, a fanfare of trumpets rang out, and the chimes of the Spassky Tower played the national anthem. Yeltsin had wanted a twenty-four-gun salute and a giant screen on Red Square to relay the scene to the masses, but Gorbachev, still master of the Kremlin, vetoed this as over the top. Patriarch Alexey II of Moscow and all Russia, resplendent in jeweled cloak and crown, made a sign of the cross over Yeltsin, the first occasion on which the Orthodox Church had given a Russian leader its blessing since the time of the tsars. A full chorus performed the “Glory” chorus from Glinka’s
A Life for the Tsar.

“Great Russia is rising from its knees,” declared Yeltsin. “We shall surely transform it into a prosperous, law-based, democratic, peaceful and sovereign state.” In front of the television cameras Gorbachev reached out to shake Yeltsin’s hand. The new Russian president deliberately stayed back, forcing Gorbachev to walk towards him.

After the ceremony Gorbachev assigned Yeltsin a ceremonial office in the Kremlin. It was located in the neoclassical mansion, Building 14, erected by Stalin in the 1930s on the site of a convent and a small palace. It was a cobblestone’s throw across a narrow courtyard from the much superior two-hundred-year-old Senate Building, listed as Building 1, where Gorbachev had his own suite of presidential offices. Gorbachev joked that there were two bears inhabiting the same den.
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That was when he thought the arrangement would endure.

Ten days later Yeltsin used his authority as elected president to make a bold move. He banned all political parties—there was only one—from organizing cells in farms, factories, colleges, military units, and state bodies on the territory of Russia. Yury Prokofyev, first secretary of the Moscow Communist Party, rushed to Gorbachev’s Kremlin office in a panic to demand he issue a decree countermanding Yeltsin. Gorbachev declined, partly to avoid a fight that would scupper the talks on a union treaty. In a single stroke, the Communist Party ceased to have a role in the Russian workplaces it had dominated for most of the century. By then Moscow had elected a radical Congress deputy, Gavriil Popov, as mayor, and the days when a party official ran the city, as Yeltsin once had, were at an end.

Observing what was going on, Gorbachev’s doctrinaire aide, Valery Boldin, concluded that by letting Yeltsin get away with it, Gorbachev had like a coward abandoned and betrayed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, of which he was still general secretary. In truth the great monolith created by Lenin was a fastdiminishing political force. Membership had declined by a quarter through resignations in the previous year, and the Politburo met only every few weeks, no longer a ruling body since Gorbachev had assumed the USSR presidency and chosen to rule by presidential decree from his Kremlin office.

The prospect of a new union treaty that would weaken the Soviet Union threw the revanchist forces in the USSR Supreme Soviet into a panic. They were on the brink of losing power. There was concern that Gorbachev was planning a party congress in the autumn of 1991 to create a new party of democratic socialism. On June 17, while Gorbachev was at Novo-Ogarevo and Yeltsin was absent in Washington, a small group of Gorbachev’s disloyal ministers had made their first move to turn back the tide. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov put forward a resolution in the USSR Supreme Soviet to transfer many of Gorbachev’s powers to himself, supposedly to deal with the critical economic situation. He demanded the authority to impose a ban on strikes, mobilize students and workers to save the harvest, and end moves to a market economy.