Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (51 page)

Gorbachev tears up talking with Chiesa about these acts of kindness. He thought it would take a whole generation before they understood, he says, taking a crumpled cutting from
Izvestia
out of his pocket and handing it to the Italian. Under the heading “Lady of Dignity” it reads: “Maybe we Russians are becoming people again.... It may only be on this sad occasion, but we are showing great respect for two people who love each other, Raisa and Mikhail. Diminutive and elegant, with sophisticated tastes, Raisa is not like the others. She has been the symbol of a country that wanted to free itself from its dreary grayness. People didn’t understand her, or perhaps they didn’t want to understand her. Maybe too much was asked of them when the couple was in power. But it’s also true that no one was able to bend their will and subdue them.” Raisa cried when she read the article, says Gorbachev.

The transplant cannot be made, and Raisa dies four weeks later, on September 20, 1999, at age sixty-seven. She is buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Yeltsin does not go to the funeral but issues a statement commemorating “a wonderful person, a beautiful woman, a loving wife and mother who is no longer with us.”

Vladimir Polyakov, the ex-president’s press secretary, believes the sympathy for the Gorbachevs has a political as well as a humanitarian side. “People need a certain amount of time to evaluate the past. He [Gorbachev] entered our lives so unexpectedly, and when he left, almost as suddenly, people needed a scapegoat. But if it had not been for Gorbachev, Yeltsin would still be sitting in Sverdlovsk as the regional Communist Party secretary. And if Yeltsin had been elected general secretary of the party in 1985 instead of Gorbachev, no changes would have happened in Russia. Now people are asking for forgiveness for not understanding that before.”
¹⁷

In November 1996 Yeltsin collapses and has a quintuple heart bypass operation. He is never the same afterwards. On December 31, 1999, he announces that he is leaving the remainder of his presidency in the hands of Vladimir Putin, who has risen from mayor’s aide in St. Petersburg to a senior position on Yeltsin’s staff, then head of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, and finally prime minister, in which role he has promoted a second war against Chechnya. For the first time in history, a Russian leader steps down voluntarily. Yeltsin tells Russians, “I want to beg forgiveness for your dreams that never came true. And also I would like to beg forgiveness not to have justified your hopes.”

His departure from the Kremlin is as low key as Gorbachev’s eight years previously. Yeltsin returns to his office after a farewell lunch at 1 p.m. and presents Putin with the squat fountain pen with which he signed decrees. “Take care of Russia,” he says and leaves the Senate Building for good.
¹⁸
Both Yeltsin and Gorbachev are invited to attend Putin’s inauguration as acting president but avoid each other.

On the tenth anniversary of his abdication, Gorbachev’s contempt for the republic leaders who conspired with Yeltsin to break up the Soviet Union remains undiminished. “I was shocked by the treacherous behavior of those people, who cut the country in pieces in order to settle accounts and establish themselves as tsars,” he tells reporters in Moscow on December 25, 2001. He could not oppose them at the time, he says, because that might have led to civil war in a nation brimming with nuclear weapons. “And what is Russia without the Soviet Union? I don’t know. A stump of some sort.”

Asked if he is happy, Gorbachev admits to not knowing what happiness is but remarks that fate allowed him to lead a process of renewal that involved the whole world. “God! What other happiness could there be!”

The former Soviet president meanwhile is embarking on a lucrative new profession as a model for advertising agencies. In December 1997 he appears in an advertisement for Pizza Hut, for which he is paid $150,000. It includes a scene at a café table in which customers argue whether Gorbachev brought freedom or chaos to Russia and concludes with an old woman saying that because of him the pizza topping goes all the way to the edge of the crust, at which all cry out, “Hail, Gorbachev!”
¹⁹
Gorbachev cites the need for funds for his foundation as the reason for subjecting himself to this indignity. In 2005 he makes a cameo appearance in the video game series
Street Fighter
II. In 2007, the man who once possessed the nuclear suitcase allows himself to be used by French fashion house Louis Vuitton to sell their vanity cases around the world. This advertisement, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, shows a pensive Gorbachev in the back of a limousine, a Louis Vuitton bag on the seat beside him, being driven past the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall. The publication poking out of the bag has a barely readable headline in Russian: “The Murder of Litvinenko: They Wanted to Give Up the Suspect for $7,000,” a reference to the poisoning by radioactive isotope of Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko in London the previous year. On his deathbed Litvinenko blamed agents of Putin’s Kremlin. The company’s ad agency Ogilvy & Mather denies trying to convey any subliminal message. The magazine
AdWeek
describes the Louis Vuitton image as one of the most successful commercial photographs of the decade.

In 2006, the year when both Gorbachev and Yeltsin celebrate their seventyfifth birthdays, they still have not mellowed towards each other. Yeltsin accuses Gorbachev, for the first time openly, of having advance knowledge of the August coup and waiting it out to see who would win. “Yeltsin is a liar; it’s sheer nonsense,” responds Gorbachev.

Boris Yeltsin dies of congestive heart failure on April 23, 2007, at age seventysix. He is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery. Putin, then in the second of two four-year terms as president, declares the day of his funeral a national day of mourning. Mikhail Gorbachev goes to the burial and offers faint praise, extending his condolences “to the family of a man on whose shoulders rested many great deeds for the good of the country and serious mistakes—a tragic fate.” Andrey Kolesnikov, writing in
Kommersant,
describes seeing Gorbachev downcast and suddenly looking much older. “It was evident that he was suffering in ways that few in the hall were; together with the life of Boris Yeltsin, a piece of his own life had been torn away.”

Two years later, at age seventy-eight, Mikhail Gorbachev announces that he is returning to politics with the creation of a new political party, the Independent Democratic Party of Russia, which he cofounds with billionaire Alexander Lebedev, part owner of the Russian newspaper
Novaya Gazeta
(New Gazette) and proprietor of three UK newspapers. The party is to be “social-democratic” and advance an “anticrisis initiative” developed by economists at the Gorbachev Foundation.

Gorbachev’s ardor for the United States cools further over the years. In 2009, as the United States and Europe struggle with economic crises, he chides Americans “who indulged in the euphoria of victory in the Cold War” for thinking that the West’s system did not need any changes. “So if you insist on me giving advice... I do believe that what America needs is its own perestroika.”
²⁰

Apart from a brief period at the end of 1991, surveys show that a majority of Russians consistently regret the breakup of the Soviet Union. A nostalgia for the Soviet era develops, partly prompted by great power nationalism and partly by the notion that there were good things about the old Soviet system, such as universal education and peace among the nationalities, and that if there were hardships, they were shared by everyone.

Despite his active opposition to the August putsch when he took to the streets to confront the putschists in St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin claims that the events of 1991 tore his life apart. Today he judges Vladimir Kryuchkov, the hard-liner who organized the coup attempt and who tried to get the KGB Alpha Group to open fire on the defenders of the Russian White House in August 1991, to be a true believer in communism “for whom I have the greatest respect.”
²¹
In an address to the Russian Federal Assembly on April 25, 2005, Putin says, “Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century.” As reasons for saying this, he cites the tens of millions of Russians who find themselves outside Russian territory, the depreciation of individual savings, the destruction of old ideals, the disbanding of institutions, the mass poverty that became the norm, and the emergence of the oligarchs. Putin concludes, “Who could have imagined that it would simply collapse? No one saw that coming—even in their worst nightmares.”

President Putin restores some of the symbols of the lost empire in an effort to revive national pride, pacify the restive empire loyalists, and bring stability back to the political system. He allows the Russian army again to fly the red flag, though without the hammer and sickle. He brings back, with new words, the Soviet national anthem that inspired Russians in the struggle against Nazi Germany, replacing the anthem by Mikhail Glinka favored by Yeltsin. He decrees that Independence Day (June 12, the anniversary of the Russian Supreme Soviet’s declaration of sovereignty in 1990) be renamed Russia Day, as the notion of independence places too much emphasis on the breakup of the Kremlin’s former empire. The former KGB officer also rehabilitates Felix Dzerzhinsky, whose statue was toppled outside the Lubyanka after the coup. On his orders a bust of the founder of the secret police is placed on a pedestal inside the old KGB headquarters in 2005. Putin becomes prime minister in 2008 when his second term as president expires, and he is succeeded by his protégé, Dmitry Medvedev.

In their interaction, Gorbachev and Yeltsin broke the Communist Party’s monopoly of power, introduced Russia’s first democratic elections, provided a free press, set free the Warsaw Pact states of Eastern Europe, gave independence to once powerless Soviet republics, and ended the Cold War. That is their legacy.

Russians today, if they can afford it, are free to live as they please, shop in modern stores, dine in elegant cafés and restaurants, emigrate and travel abroad, send their children to elite foreign schools, and freely criticize the regime in print, if not on television. At the same time the move towards Western-style democracy has stalled in the aftermath of the fall of communism, the electronic media reflects Kremlin views, courts are subservient to power, protest rallies are broken up, personal enrichment rather than ideology is the driving force in politics, the electorate is powerless to produce results the leadership doesn’t like, and the KGB has returned to the forefront of Russian life as the FSB.

For Mikhail Gorbachev, who turned eighty on March 2, 2011, the nightmare for Russia is far from over. He protests that Russian leaders are steadily rolling back the democratic achievements of his time and that the first and only free, competitive, and honest elections ever held in Russia were those that he initiated before the end of 1991. He observes that there are still many people in society who fear democracy and prefer authoritarian stability. “We’re only halfway down the road from a totalitarian regime to democracy and freedom,” he says. “And the battle continues.”
²²

The office in the Senate Building in the Kremlin that Gorbachev was so reluctant to leave and that Yeltsin seized in such triumph is no more. It was ripped out in a major reconstruction that took place from 1994 to 1998. The renovated Senate Building is today the ceremonial residence of the Russian president.

Lenin’s artifacts from his former Kremlin office down the corridor have long since been removed and are now on display in his dacha at the village of Gorki Leninskiye on the outskirts of Moscow. The immense picture of
Lenin’s Speech at the Third Congress, of the Komsomol,
which dominated the Great Kremlin Palace for nearly half a century, has been replaced by a panorama of Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod fighting Teutonic Knights in 1242.

For two decades the embalmed body of the founder of the communist system that Gorbachev and Yeltsin in their different ways brought crashing down on December 25, 1991, continues to repose in the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square, preserved by glycerin and potassium acetate and kept at a temperature of 61 degrees. Queues of Russians form every day to pay their respects, and the jackbooted honor guard still springs to life to march back and forth with the precision of the figures on a Swiss clock, every hour on the hour, at the sound of the chimes from the Savior Tower, as if nothing has changed.

NOTES

Introduction

1
Palazchenko,
My Years with Gorbachev and Sbevardreadze,
361.

2
Woolf,
Nuclear Weapons in the Former
Soviet
Union.

3
Baker with DeFrank,
The Politics of Diplomacy,
583.

4
Bush and Scowcroft,
A World Transformed,
555.

5
Grachev,
Final Days
, 87.

Chapter 1: December 25: Before the Dawn

1
Weather details are from
www.tutiempo.net
.

2
The description of Red Square is from contemporary newspaper accounts.

3
I visited the Church of St. Louis before this date and spoke to Sofia Peonkova.

4
Neuffer, “In Moscow a Christmas Leap of Faith.”

5
Gaidar,
Days of defeat and Victory,
111.

Chapter 2: December 25: Sunrise

1
Murray,
A Democracy of Despots,
136.

2
Gorbachev’s dacha and the couple’s lifestyle are described in Gorbacheva,
I Hope;
Gorbachev,
Memoirs;
Chernyaev,
My Six Years with Gorbachev;
Korzhakov,
Boris Yeltsin ;
and Boldin,
Ten Years That Shook the World.