Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (39 page)

Gorbachev produced for Yeltsin a certificate giving him control over the Archives of the General Secretary. This was a collection of between 1,000 and 2,000 files that contained secret documents passed on by Soviet leaders from the time of the founding of the state by Lenin. They were known to senior Soviet officials as the Stalinskiye Arkhivy, the Stalin Archives.

Though many of the crimes of past communist leaders had been acknowledged for the first time under Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, the top secret documents still held proof of criminal actions at the highest levels of Soviet power, most of which had never been admitted publicly. They implicated recent Soviet leaders in the cover-up and denials of the Stalin terror, and many other bloody episodes that would sustain charges that, in the past, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a vast criminal conspiracy and was implicated in international terrorism.

Every general secretary received the archives on taking office. They all knew, or could find out, what secrets they concealed.

One of the files handed over by Gorbachev detailed a plan to send a ship with arms to the left-wing Official Irish Republican Army at a time when the illegal group was conducting a campaign of bombing and killings in Northern Ireland. Called “Operation Splash,” it was approved by Politburo member and KGB chief Yury Andropov in response to a request from Irish Communist Party leader Michael O’Riordan, who claimed he was in secret contact with the Official IRA. A memo signed by Andropov on August 21, 1972, authorized the submerging of a consignment of captured German weapons, including two machine guns, seventy automatic rifles, ten Walther pistols, and 41,600 cartridges, in the Irish sea off the Northern Ireland coast, to be hauled up later by the “Irish friends” in a fishing boat. A reconnaissance ship, Reduktor, had already picked the spot and sounded the depths, Andropov noted. Yeltsin was later unable to say if Operation Splash succeeded but concluded that quite possibly “our ‘friends’ once again made themselves known with their trademark explosions and murders, causing the whole world to shudder.”
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Gorbachev then pushed back his chair and went to his office safe, from which he extracted two large envelopes tied with string and with broken wax seals. There was one document they should inspect first, he said when he resumed his seat. He began reading the contents to his two companions. It was a memo, dated March 5, 1940, from Lavrenty Beria, head of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, which recommended the execution of 25,700 Polish prisoners in Katyn Forest near Smolensk. Written on it in Stalin’s blue pencil were the words, “Resolution of the Politburo,” and the signatures of Stalin, Molotov, Mikoyan, and Voroshilov. Gorbachev also read aloud a deposition from Alexander Shelepin, former head of the KGB. In 1959 Shelepin had given the total number of Polish victims shot in 1940 as 21,857, and proposed to Khrushchev the destruction of all incriminating documents.
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The file was conclusive evidence that the Politburo ordered the slaughter of the Polish officers. For five years after Gorbachev took office, it had been Soviet practice to continue the postwar fiction of blaming the Germans for carrying out the mass killings after they invaded the USSR in 1941. In April 1990 the exhumation of bodies and other circumstantial evidence had compelled Gorbachev to admit the truth, but only partially. He authorized the Soviet news agency TASS to express profound regret to Poland for Stalin’s “heinous crime,” as if Stalin had acted alone.

Gorbachev had never conceded that the evidence existed of full Politburo approval of one of the worst crimes in European history. Here at last was the absolute proof of the complicity not just of Stalin and the notorious Beria but of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Yakovlev listened with a growing sense of anger. As a historian, he had been seeking these papers everywhere. He concluded at once that Gorbachev knew all along about their existence but had kept them from him.

“Gorbachev in my presence gave Yeltsin the package with all the documents on Katyn [and] when the envelope was opened it turned out that they were notes about the shooting of Polish military and civilians,” he wrote later. “Gorbachev was sitting there stone-faced as if nothing was ever discussed on that matter. Time and time again I asked in the general department of the Central Committee which documents are in the Politburo archives regarding this, and I got the same response each time—there is nothing.” He was bewildered at finding evidence that Gorbachev withheld such material over the years. “Gorbachev would have gained politically and morally if he made them public; he didn’t have good judgment of people but he was an even worse judge of himself.”

Gorbachev subsequently claimed that he had only received the incriminating documents the previous evening from Revenko, who had his attention drawn to them by the director of the archives and insisted that the president look at them. By Gorbachev’s account, it took his breath away to read “this hellish paper which condemned to death thousands of people at a single stroke.”
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His former chief of staff, Valery Boldin, would claim in his memoir that he had shown the documents in question to Gorbachev more than two years earlier, prior to a visit to Poland, and that his boss told him not to show them to anyone else, saying, “This is a hanging matter.”
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Archive annotations show that in 1989 Boldin did open the file containing the Politburo order to shoot the Poles and that every Soviet leader since Stalin, and not excluding Gorbachev, had read the secret file and knew the truth. According to Gorbachev, the two sets of documents Boldin showed him simply related to a Stalin-era commission pinning the blame for the massacre on the Nazis.

Chernyaev would later take the charitable view that Boldin was trying to discredit Gorbachev and doubted that Gorbachev ever did see the execution command.

The three men agreed that the “smoking gun” documents would have to be delivered to the Poles. “I’m afraid they can lead to international complications. But now this is your mission, Boris Nikolayevich,” said Gorbachev, handing them over. Yeltsin would release the documents to the Russian media the following October.
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The rest of the secret files were stuffed into boxes. “Take it—now it’s all yours,” said Gorbachev. Yeltsin signed the receipt. Yakovlev was later “dumbfounded” to discover that they included secrets that even he, with his research into Bolshevik atrocities, had not imagined. Among them was an order signed by Lenin for the execution of 25,000 Russian Orthodox priests in the civil war of 1918 to 1921, though it is doubtful if this was carried out. All Russians knew that Stalin’s hands were bloody, but many revered Lenin as the father of the nation and did not associate him with mass killings.

The man who had presided over the Soviet Union for the previous six years asked about his own immunity from prosecution. “If you are worried about something, confess it now, while you are still president,” said Yeltsin.
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Gorbachev did not take him up on his offer.

Next Gorbachev turned to the question of the foundation he was setting up in Moscow to give him a public service role after his resignation. He had already told his aides it would be “a powerful intellectual center that will initiate the process of establishment in Russia of a really democratic society, and if necessary the center will take the role of a powerful opposition against those dilettantes and self-satisfied mediocrities.”

Here in the Walnut Room, using less provocative language, he explained that the foundation would be a nongovernment organization for the study of economics and politics. He needed a suitable building for what he would call the Fund for Social and Political Research. Yeltsin objected to the phrase “political research.” He did not want a hostile foundation nosing around in Russian government affairs. Gorbachev insisted that it would not be turned into “a breeding ground for the opposition.” The exchange became heated, until Yakovlev came up with a compromise. “Let’s call it the Fund for Social and Political Studies,” he suggested. They eventually agreed on the title: The International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies (The Gorbachev Foundation).
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Yeltsin was still leery about Gorbachev’s intentions. “You won’t create an opposition party on the basis of the foundation, will you?” he asked. Gorbachev replied that he would not, and moreover, “I will support and defend the leadership of Russia as long as it conducts democratic transformations.” Satisfied, Yeltsin signed over to Gorbachev the deeds of a marble-fronted, three-story building on Leningradsky Prospekt in northwest Moscow. It had once housed the Lenin School, an academic training ground for members of foreign underground movements.

At six o’clock the Soviet president excused himself. He had scheduled a farewell telephone conversation with John Major.

The British prime minister regarded both Gorbachev and Yeltsin as remarkable men, Gorbachev as a communist who believed communism could be reformed, Yeltsin as an anticommunist who believed it had to be destroyed. At a private dinner in London the previous July, Major had found Gorbachev “a charmer with a self-deprecating wit” who had regaled him with anecdotes, including the story of the man in the vodka line who went off to shoot the general secretary in the Kremlin. Major concluded, however, that Gorbachev was simply unable to grasp the basic essentials of the free market and the merits of competition and that his understanding of privatization was negligible. Nevertheless, the prime minister was sad to see him leave the political stage and was calling to wish him well.

Gorbachev’s translator was summoned from his office to interpret the conversation. Palazchenko found the security post in the corridor approaching Gorbachev’s office manned by an unusually large number of people, who included Yeltsin’s bodyguards. One of them asked for his ID before letting him pass. That hadn’t happened before.

The interpreter saw immediately that the cognac had had an effect on Gorbachev. There was a whiff of liquor on his breath, and he noticed how Gorbachev chose his words carefully, “perhaps partly because he did not want any slips of the tongue caused by the drinks he had had.” Grachev also thought that his boss looked flushed and a little dazed as he lifted the receiver and that he struggled to find the tone of familiarity he used with world leaders, though within a minute or two he had recovered. Chernyaev observed his boss then conduct a conversation with Major that he felt must have stunned the British prime minister with its sincerity.

“Today, dear John,” began Gorbachev, “I am trying to accomplish what is most important: to keep what is happening here from resulting in losses. You know I still feel that the best solution would be a unified state, but there are the republics’ positions to consider.” He reassured Major that the breakup of the Soviet Union would not result in another Yugoslavia. “That’s what matters the most to me—to you too, I would imagine.” Yeltsin and he had been talking for six hours, he said, and had reached “a common understanding of our responsibility to the country and the world.” He added diplomatically, “I ask you to help the Commonwealth and Russia in particular.” Glancing over at Grachev, as if to confirm their earlier agreement about the timing of his resignation, Gorbachev confided, “Sometime in the next two days I will make my position public.”

He added a comment that betrayed his unwillingness, even then, to accept the finality of his situation. “I don’t want to say my farewells yet,” he told Major, “because any turn of events is still possible, even a reversal.”

Gorbachev became quite emotional when the British prime minister told him that whatever decision he made, “you will unquestionably occupy a special place in the history of your country and the world.”

“Thank you for everything,” replied Gorbachev, his eyes glistening. “Raisa and I have grown very fond of you, both you and Norma.”

While Gorbachev was out of the room, the conversation between Yakovlev and Yeltsin continued in a more relaxed fashion, fueled by more glasses of vodka. The Russian president reproached Yakovlev for publicly criticizing his actions in making Russia independent, and Yakovlev retorted that he thought the decision was “illegitimate and undemocratic.” But there was little personal antagonism. Yeltsin asked him what he would do with himself now that he no longer had a job as presidential adviser. Yakovlev said he would work for Gorbachev in the foundation. “Why would you? He betrayed you more than once,” said Yeltsin. “It’s not as if you don’t have other opportunities.” This sounded to Yakovlev like an invitation to work with the Russian administration, but he didn’t take it up. He said he was simply sorry for Gorbachev. “God forbid that anyone should be in his situation.”

Yakovlev took it on himself to warn Yeltsin not to let the intelligence service get too powerful or allow it to control information reaching him. He reminded him that information fed to Gorbachev by the KGB had succeeded in frightening the president into adopting a hard line against the democrats. Yeltsin agreed and said that he was going to set up five or six channels of information—though as Yakovlev later noted, nothing ever came out of that. In this context the name of Yevgeny Primakov, director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, came up. Yeltsin said from what he knew, Primakov was inclined to drink too much. “No more nor less than others,” said Yakovlev dryly. Yeltsin looked at him suspiciously but didn’t say anything.

Gorbachev seemed in no hurry to return to Yeltsin’s company and kept Major on the phone for half an hour. The less power he had, the longer his conversations lasted. Alexander Rutskoy was overheard once, as he rushed from his office late for a meeting, “Damn, every time Gorbachev calls he blabs on for a half hour.”
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After he bid Major good-bye, Gorbachev remarked to Grachev and Chernyaev that he and Yeltsin had worked everything out, and “I’m going back in to wind things up.”