Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (38 page)

In the Washington suburbs, a generation of sovietologists, correspondents, academics, and economists who had been dealing with the mysterious and closed USSR over the years pause in their preparations for Christmas lunch to watch the news from Moscow. Many are in a state of incomprehension—even a few weeks ago it seemed the Soviet Union would prevail in one form or other.

As Gorbachev is preparing to make his broadcast, another convoy with sirens wailing makes its way to the Kremlin. It is the president of Russia, who has just finished his crisis meeting with Moscow’s deputy mayor, Yury Luzhkov, in the White House. His car pulls up outside Building 14 just before seven o’clock. Accompanied by Gennady Burbulis, Yeltsin takes the lift to the fourth floor, where he has his Kremlin office. An assistant has the television switched on.

Yeltsin’s office has a more personal feel than Gorbachev’s presidential suite in the adjoining building. The walls are decorated with a picture of Yeltsin on the tank during the coup, an ornate religious icon, and a framed painting of his eighty-three-year-old mother Klavdiya Vasilyevna Yeltsina, copied from a photograph by the painter Ilya Glazunov, a well-known purveyor of Russian nationalism. There is a map of the Soviet Union covered with colored pins signifying hot spots of ethnic and nationalist crises.

The group gathers round the television to observe Gorbachev doing what Yeltsin publicly first asked him to do in his famous televised interview ten months ago. At that time his call for Gorbachev’s resignation had provoked outrage and dismay around the world.

Everything is now in place for the final act of the transition. As soon as Gorbachev has finished speaking, the Russian president is to walk across the narrow courtyard to Gorbachev’s office. There, in the presence of Marshal Shaposhnikov and the television cameras, he will take formal possession of the nuclear suitcase and will become the legal successor in Russia of the last president of the USSR.

The world will see the two rivals shake hands and smile as the
chemodanchik
changes ownership and the curtain comes down on seventy-four years of Soviet rule. At least that is the plan.

CHAPTER 23

THE DEAL IN THE WALNUT ROOM

The details of the transition of power were worked out during a nine-hour encounter between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin two days before the Soviet president gave his resignation address on the evening of December 25, 1991.
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After the conspiracy in the Belovezh Forest, which killed off his political career, Gorbachev went through the first two stages of grief—denial and anger. After Alma-Ata he moved to the third stage—bargaining. He now had to negotiate his retirement package. He had got his aides to draw up decrees regarding his pension and living conditions and prepare drafts of a resignation address. But he couldn’t bring himself to set the final wheels in motion.

Yeltsin forced the issue in typical fashion. In midmorning on Monday, December 23, six years to the day since Gorbachev promoted him to Moscow party chief, the Russian president sent word that he was on his way to the Senate Building to set the terms for Gorbachev’s exit from political life.

The president’s aides were furious at the short notice. Grachev perceived Yeltsin to be acting as he always did, capriciously and aggressively.
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But as Gorbachev’s former deputy spokesman Sergey Grigoryev put it, “Yeltsin had Gorbachev by the balls.” Now that the republics had signed up to the Commonwealth of Independent States, scheduled to come into existence on January 1, there was no longer a role for a Union president.

The unexpected arrival of Yeltsin was doubly embarrassing for Gorbachev’s staff. They had alerted Ted Koppel and his television crew to be in the Kremlin to film something quite different.

“When we picked up our equipment on that Monday morning, we were told Gorbachev would be taping his resignation speech in his office in a matter of minutes,” said Koppel. “He was, we were told, getting a haircut in preparation. Waiting with us was Gorbachev’s makeup artist. At one point a member of the president’s personal security guard came to the door to tell us that Gorbachev was a minute away. The president’s desk with two Soviet flags behind it was fully lit. Two large cameras from Soviet state television were already beaming the signal out for taping.

“But he never showed up. It was just past 11 a.m., and Boris Yeltsin was coming to the Kremlin for a meeting.”
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With Yeltsin on his way, Gorbachev had to scrap plans to prerecord his speech and make up his mind quickly when he would actually announce his departure to the nation. He told Grachev he would most likely broadcast his resignation speech live the following day. “There’s no sense in dragging this out,” he sighed.

“Wouldn’t it be better to wait until Wednesday?” Grachev suggested. “Tomorrow is December 24, Christmas Eve. In many countries this is the biggest holiday of the year. Let people celebrate in peace.” “All right,” said Gorbachev, who like his press secretary was seemingly unaware that the “biggest holiday” was Christmas Day, “but Wednesday at the latest.”

Grachev asked Gorbachev if he thought it would be acceptable for the American and Russian television crews to film the two leaders in the act of greeting each other. This would be an important encounter between the two men who had shaped Russia’s destiny, and it should be recorded for history. Gorbachev gave his OK with a wave of his hand.

Knowing how prickly Yeltsin could be, and worried he might suspect an ambush of some sort, Grachev went to ask Yeltsin, too, for permission. As Yeltsin emerged from the elevator, flanked by his wary and unsmiling bodyguard, Korzhakov, Grachev inquired if the camera crews could record his arrival. “Out of the question, otherwise I’ll cancel the meeting,” snorted Yeltsin. Grachev signaled to the television people to leave. There was no doubting whose wishes must be obeyed, even in the precincts of Gorbachev’s own office.

Koppel remembered the Russian leader glowering as he walked towards the office. He felt that Yeltsin was angry at him. “I was paying all this attention to Gorbachev. He felt I should be seeking him out. He was the new boy in town. This was his moment; he was absorbing all the power. It was bleeding through Gorbachev’s hands minute by minute.”

In an interview not long before, Yeltsin had bluntly told Koppel his opinion of Gorbachev: “To a large extent, I don’t like him.”

Yeltsin waited until the reporters left before he would even cross the threshold into Gorbachev’s sanctum.

Zhenya, the Kremlin waiter, brought in a tray with coffee, cups, shot glasses, and two bottles, vodka for Yeltsin and Jubilee cognac for Gorbachev, “to go with the coffee,” as Chernyaev observed dryly. After some small talk they took their jackets off and in shirt sleeves and ties moved to the adjacent Walnut Room. It was in this same room on March 11, 1985, the day after the death of Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko, that the Politburo of the Communist Party agreed to make Mikhail Gorbachev general secretary of the party and undisputed leader of the Soviet Union.

Sitting beneath alabaster chandeliers at the end of the long teakwood table with fifteen chairs, the two antagonists discussed the implications of the agreement reached at Alma-Ata. Gorbachev was angry and heavy-hearted but resigned. As Grachev put it, “There was no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube.”

Gorbachev conceded to Yeltsin that for the sake of peace and order he would publicly accept the CIS as the constitutional successor to the Soviet Union. Yeltsin listened attentively to his warnings about the dangers of Balkanization. He in turn asked Gorbachev to lend him his support for the next six months, or at least not criticize him, while he imposed shock therapy on Russia.

It was inevitably going to be a tense encounter. Gorbachev’s aide Georgy Shakhnazarov noted that it was not in Gorbachev’s character to be humble nor in Yeltsin’s to be magnanimous. The two agreed to invite Alexander Yakovlev to “referee” the meeting.

The sixty-eight-year-old father of glasnost came limping into the room. He was intrigued to be there. It meant that he would be a witness “not only to the beginning but also to the end of the lofty career of Mikhail Gorbachev.” Like his mentor, the former ambassador to Canada and cheerleader for perestroika did not want to see the Soviet Union broken up, and he was opposed to what Yeltsin had done. Nevertheless, the Russian president respected him for his courageous role during the coup and for his campaign to expose the crimes of Stalin. In October Yeltsin had appointed Yakovlev to chair a commission for the rehabilitation of victims of political repression.

The two presidents agreed on a transition timetable. Gorbachev would abdicate two days later, on December 25. He would broadcast his resignation speech to the nation at seven o’clock in the evening of that day. After finishing his address, he would sign the decrees resigning as president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and giving up his position as commander in chief of the Soviet armed forces. Immediately after that, Yeltsin would come to his office with Defense Minister Shaposhnikov and take possession of the nuclear suitcase. Gorbachev and his staff could continue using their Kremlin offices for a further four days after Gorbachev’s resignation, until December 29, to conduct unfinished business and clear out their desks, after which Yeltsin would move in with his staff as president of Russia. The red flag would come down from the Kremlin on December 31.
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Shakhnazarov, who was called into the meeting briefly, would tell Gorbachev’s assembled staff of aides, officials, interpreters, receptionists, typists, and researchers the next day that they had to leave the Kremlin on December 29, and that the presidential apparatus would stop functioning on January 2.
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In return for all this, Gorbachev would step down gracefully, not challenge Yeltsin’s right to succeed him, and stay out of the political fray to give the Russian president a clear run to implement his economic reforms.

Once the basics were settled, the heads of Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s secretariats, Grigory Revenko and Yury Petrov, were brought in to take notes on the nitty-gritty of Gorbachev’s future welfare.

“Gorbachev submitted a list of claims—his compensation package—that ran to several pages,” claimed Yeltsin later. “Almost all the items were purely material demands. He wanted a pension equaling a presidential salary, indexed to inflation; a presidential apartment and dacha; a car for himself and his wife. But more than anything he wanted a foundation, a big building in the center of Moscow, the former Academy of Social Sciences, and with it car service, office equipment, and security guards. Psychologically his reasoning was very simple: If you want to get rid of me so badly, then be so good as to dig deep into your pockets.”

Yeltsin agreed that the Gorbachevs could see out their retirement in a smaller state dacha and apartment, with two official cars and twenty staff, including security, drivers, cooks, and service personnel. He declined to authorize a separate ex-president’s office and staff, and he cut back the amount of pension requested and the number of bodyguards. He signed a decree giving Gorbachev a pension equivalent to his salary of 4,000 rubles a month—ten times the average Soviet wage but a mere $40 at the official rate of exchange. The arrangement would not leave Gorbachev in penury. He was already wealthy from advance royalties for his memoirs.

Next they settled on provisions for Gorbachev’s inner circle. They agreed to set up a bilateral commission headed by Revenko and Petrov to find jobs for Gorbachev’s displaced staff. The Soviet president asked Yeltsin to allow his associates Ivan Silayev and Shakhnazarov to buy their state dachas at reasonable prices. Silayev was the last prime minister of the Soviet Union, an office that had been defunct since the coup, and Shakhnazarov had been by Gorbachev’s side throughout the last turbulent years. The Russian president agreed. Turning to Yakovlev, he offered him the same deal. Yakovlev declined. He regretted his decision in years to come, as property prices in Moscow soared.

The terms Yeltsin agreed to with Gorbachev were on a par with legislation passed by the USSR Supreme Soviet over a year earlier. This provided for a pension and state-owned dacha with the necessary staff, bodyguard, and transport for the president on leaving office. They were also remarkably similar to those granted in 1964 to Nikita Khrushchev, the only other Soviet leader to be ousted from power. Khrushchev, another would-be reformer, was sacked by the Politburo for alleged policy failures and erratic behavior. He was given a pension and was allowed to remain in his general secretary’s mansion and his city apartment for a year after his departure, before moving to a smaller state mansion. But Khrushchev was made a nonperson. He simply disappeared from public view. His name did not appear again in Moscow newspapers until he died seven years later. This distressed him deeply. He spent days weeping bitterly. Asked once what Khrushchev did in retirement, his grandson replied, “He cries.” Gorbachev would not become a nonperson, but he too would shed a tear before the day was out.

The two adversaries, Yakovlev recalled, managed up to this point to conduct a very business-like and mutually respectful meeting. “They argued sometimes but without any rancor. I was very sorry they did not start cooperating at that level of mutual understanding before.” He thought whisperers on both sides had helped poison the atmosphere between them.

At one o’clock Zhenya delivered lunch to the three men. They helped themselves to salads and salami, potato and cabbage pies, and bottles of fizzy mineral water. When the waiter emerged with his empty cart, aides to both presidents quizzed him about how they were getting on. He told them the meeting seemed to have got off to a civilized start.

With the material terms of the transition agreed, Revenko and Petrov left. Only Yakovlev would witness what transpired next.