Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (6 page)

Despite his populist style he conformed to the prevailing orthodoxy and voiced ritual denunciations of Western imperialism. In September 1977, under instructions from Moscow, he ordered the bulldozing of Ipatiev House in Sverdlovsk, the two-story mansion in which the tsar’s family had been murdered, to prevent it becoming an anti-Soviet shrine.

Gorbachev and Yeltsin first met when the Sverdlovsk boss came to Moscow for sessions of the rubber-stamp Supreme Soviet parliament. They embraced in comradely fashion, but their personalities collided. They had different ways of getting things done. Where Gorbachev was spontaneous in speech, Yeltsin was ponderous. The man from Stavropol could be vain, voluble, and at times charming, and as a natural insider he was adept at playing political games to get his way. The Sverdlovsk native, on the other hand, was an on-site boss with a strong physical presence, an outspoken grandstander who believed in hands-on management and was prepared to make huge bets on his political instincts. Where Gorbachev was perceived as a sophisticated and urbane Moscow university law graduate who liked to quote the revolutionary poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky
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and pontificate endlessly at party meetings, driving his comrades to distraction, Yeltsin was a provincial from the hardscrabble Urals whose preferred method of driving his comrades to distraction was by playing “Kalinka” with wooden spoons, sometimes bouncing them playfully off the heads of aides, who learned to move away prudently when the spoons came out.
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Yeltsin was at first enthusiastic about Gorbachev as a refreshingly open, sincere, and frank leader. Gorbachev, on the other hand, had early misgivings about the stormer from the Urals. He would later describe how he recoiled from the sight of Yeltsin being helped from a session of the Supreme Soviet while his smiling Sverdlovsk comrades explained, “It happens with our first secretary—sometimes he has a little too much to drink.”
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For his part, the Sverdlovsk boss began to find the new general secretary patronizing when he attended party meetings in Moscow. He felt uneasy with Gorbachev’s preference for the familiar form of address. Gorbachev freely used
ty
instead of the more formal
vy,
and this to Yeltsin implied a lack of respect for his comrades. Like most Russian adults, Yeltsin only used the appellation ty with his family and most intimate friends.

The relationship cooled after Gorbachev received a critical report on the livestock industry in Sverdlovsk. Yeltsin protested that the report was distorted, but Gorbachev dressed him down anyway. Nevertheless, on Ligachev’s recommendation, Gorbachev sent him an invitation to come to Moscow and head up the Central Committee’s construction department. It meant supervising building projects around the country. But Yeltsin was affronted and declined the offer as too modest. His predecessors as party secretary in Sverdlovsk had been given higher posts when brought to the capital. Only after Ligachev phoned him, on April 4, 1985, and told him it was a matter of party discipline, did he agree to accept. Yeltsin moved to Moscow with his family. He arrived with a chip on his shoulder and inflated expectations. He was also somewhat jealous of Gorbachev, a party official of the same age who had not managed a region as big or important as Sverdlovsk but had been promoted faster.

Yeltsin went to pay his respects to Gorbachev in his fifth-floor office in the Central Committee building in Moscow’s Staraya Ploshchad, or Old Square. It was the practice at the time for Soviet leaders to have their administrative office in this rambling structure near Red Square and to use the Kremlin only for party gatherings and for receiving important guests. The general secretary spoke to Yeltsin from behind an enormous writing table, under the watchful eyes of Lenin in a large portrait on the wall directly above him. Only high-ranking officials could sit beneath Lenin. For lesser bureaucrats the picture had to be placed to one side.
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The protocol dispensed with, Yeltsin flung himself into his work as head of the party’s construction department. He traveled around the Soviet Union inspecting major building projects. In Uzbekistan a KGB officer slipped him documents showing that the party boss there, Usman Khodzhaev, was on the take. He brought them to Gorbachev, who—by Yeltsin’s account—blew up and accused him of allowing himself to be fooled. Ligachev himself had vouched for the honesty of the official, he said. But Yeltsin’s source was right. Two years later the Uzbek boss was sacked, tried, and convicted of crimes.

In December 1985, Gorbachev decided that Yeltsin’s bullheadedness and aggressive manner could be put to better use. Moscow needed a thorough cleanup. The capital city, run by the cocksure and grossly inefficient first secretary, Viktor Grishin, was decaying from neglect and mired in corruption. Food supplies rotted in filthy depots. There was widespread graft and cheating and a black market in everything from cabbages to caviar. Many problems had piled up, and Gorbachev believed they needed a large bulldozer to clear the way. Yeltsin met all the requirements. Though blunt and quarrelsome, he was an apparently sincere communist with no connections to corrupt Moscow city officials. The new post also meant that Yeltsin would be elevated to candidate member of the Politburo, thereby satisfying his ambition for rapid promotion.

If he knew what opinions Yeltsin was expressing privately about some of the Communist Party leaders, Gorbachev might have had second thoughts about offering him the post. On a trip back to Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin voiced his contempt for the “old fools” running the show, a term his rather horrified comrades took to mean the most important men in the Politburo, including Ligachev. But it was Ligachev who was most enthusiastic about promoting Yeltsin. He regarded his fellow Siberian as a good, honest, party man with the force of personality to get things done, whether by bullying or storming. As a socialist puritan Ligachev valued hard work in cadres as the ideal way of perfecting the worker-peasant state.

But Soviet prime minister Nikolay Ryzhkov, a dry, practical executive also from Sverdlovsk who knew Yeltsin of old, warned Gorbachev that while he was a builder by profession, Yeltsin was a destroyer by nature. “You’ll have trouble with him,” he said. “I know him, and I would not recommend him.”
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Gorbachev stifled his doubts. On December 23, 1985, the Politburo assigned Yeltsin the post of first secretary of the country’s corrupt capital city, with a mandate to clean it up and get things moving.

CHAPTER 4

DECEMBER 25: MORNING

Just before 10 a.m. on December 25, 1991, slightly later than usual, Gorbachev’s limousine comes within sight of the Kremlin, the seventy-eight-acre fortress within one and a half miles of crenellated brick walls that has been the seat of communist government since 1918. The last Soviet leader can see the red flag with its hammer and sickle hanging limply in the soft breeze on the mast on top of the Senate Building. He expects it to remain there until the USSR expires at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Then it is due to be replaced by the white, blue, and red flag of independent Russia, with a grand display of fireworks. At least that is what he has been told.

Waiting inside the Kremlin walls for the presidential Zil is Ted Koppel of ABC, with his executive producer Rick Kaplan and a camera crew.
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They are covering the last days of Gorbachev’s presidency. The celebrated U.S. television reporter, his fine silver-grey hair combed down over his forehead, is wearing a duffel coat with toggle fastenings and is hatless in the chilly air.

Koppel and Kaplan are laughing at a misunderstanding that has just occurred in an exchange with a friendly Kremlin functionary. The official approached the Americans and wished them a Happy Christmas. With a straight face Kaplan, who is Jewish, replied, “To me you will have to say ”Happy Hanukkah.”“Why would I have to say ‘Happy Honecker’?” asked the official, puzzled. The Americans burst out laughing at the official’s assumption that Kaplan is referring to Erich Honecker, who fled to Moscow after the fall of the Berlin Wall two years earlier.

The mistake is understandable. The disgraced East German leader is in the news again this morning. The seventy-nine-year-old communist hard-liner was given compassionate asylum in Moscow by Gorbachev, who privately regards him as an “asshole” but who felt he should protect an old comrade. Fearing that after Gorbachev is no longer in power, Yeltsin will send him back to Berlin, Honecker has claimed political asylum in the embassy of Chile. At about the same time as they joke about him, the Russian justice minister, Nikolay Fyodorov, is telling a press conference across town that Russia is washing its hands of the asylum seeker and his fate is now a matter between Germany and Chile to work out. (Six months later Honecker is extradited to Germany but, too ill to stand trial, is allowed to emigrate to Chile, where he dies in 1994.)

Once through the Kremlin’s Borovitsky Gate, Gorbachev’s Zil continues past the Great Kremlin Palace and the grandiose glass-and-concrete Palace of Congresses, erected by Khrushchev for important Communist Party meetings, and on into the central Kremlin Square. As the driver spots Koppel and his camera crew, he brings the Zil to a halt, and by prior arrangement the Soviet president climbs out, adjusting his fur hat, to walk with the Americans the last bit of the way to his office.

As always with the Western media Gorbachev is engaging and courteous, and he greets the ABC television crew with a friendly smile. Koppel is struck by how calm he is, given the circumstances. “He showed very little emotion throughout, he was very businesslike, very self-contained and dignified.” The broadcaster likes Gorbachev. “He reminded me of my father, an old-world European. When my father needed to get something notarized he dressed in a suit. I would tell him a notary public was some pimply faced kid in a drug store, but he would say, ‘No, a notary is important, he expects to be treated with dignity.’ That’s what Gorbachev was like.”

The Soviet leader and the American reporter walk slowly towards Gorbachev’s office building, with the camera crew recording their conversation, translated by a bulky female Russian interpreter walking close behind, her hair tied tightly in a bun. “Today is a culmination of sorts. I’m feeling absolutely calm, absolutely free,” insists Gorbachev, when Koppel inquires how he is coping. “Only my role is being changed. I am not leaving either political or public life. This [a peaceful transition] is happening probably for the first time here. Even in this I have turned out to be a pioneer. That is, the process we are following is democratic. My resignation from the office of the presidency doesn’t mean political death.”
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Was there perhaps a fable or parable that he might tell to a grandchild about what has happened in his country? Koppel asks. “Here is a fable that I learned some years ago,” replies Gorbachev. “A young ruler wanted to rule in a more humane way in his kingdom. And he asked the views of the wise men. And it took ten years to bring twenty volumes of advice. He said, ‘When am I going to read all that? I have to govern my country.’ Ten years later they brought him just ten volumes of advice. He said that is still too much. Five years later he was brought just one volume. But by then twenty-five years have passed and he was on his deathbed. And one of the wise men said, ‘All that is here can be summarized in a simple formula—people are born, people suffer, and people die.’” The message is clear: Gorbachev the reformer has suffered and done his best.

The Stavropol native likes to pepper his responses with such parables and anecdotes, especially for foreigners. At his last meeting with President Bush eight weeks ago, he tried to convince him of the nobility of his efforts to create a new Union by relating the story of a passerby who asked construction workers what they are doing. “We are breaking our backs,” replied one. But another said, “Can’t you see we are building a temple here?”

When Kaplan asks the Soviet president if it distresses him to be like Moses, led to the Jordan River but unable to cross, Gorbachev replies: “A man is walking by the Moscow River. He falls in. He can’t swim. He shouts ‘Help!’ He is ignored. He thinks perhaps the people passing by don’t understand Russian. He shouts for help in German. No good. He shouts for help in French and Spanish. He is about to go under when a man throws him a lifeline and says, ‘If you spent more time learning how to swim you wouldn’t be in this trouble.’”

Gorbachev also likes to compare his political trajectory and the fate of his reforms to that of the heroic airline pilot in the Soviet film
The Crew
, who risks taking off during an earthquake saying, “It’s not safe to fly, but we can’t stay here. So we’re going to fly.”
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The small procession comes to the Senate Building, the four-story neoclassic citadel of Soviet power, built by Catherine the Great in the shape of a triangle, with its roof just visible from Red Square. The dome with the red flag once bore a statue of Justice, which was destroyed by Napoleon’s troops in 1812. Today it is topped by a circular railed platform and a twenty-foot pole for the flag. At the entrance is a set of steps and a spectacular view of St. Nicholas’s Tower. In Stalin’s day being “summoned to the steps” meant being ordered to his office, a frightening prospect. Pausing at the door, Gorbachev quotes Winston Churchill about the difference between a politician and a statesman: “The politician thinks about the next elections—the statesman thinks about the next generation.” The message again is evident. He is a statesman. He is not a mere politician, like a certain other.

The president takes the elevator to the third floor, where his office is situated along a dimly lit corridor with a high ceiling. There is a long red carpet down the middle and doors on either side. It smells of antiquity and fresh paint.
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Lenin lived in three large rooms with a kitchen along the same corridor. His former study is preserved as a museum and contains a wicker-backed chair and desk with papers and appointment books arranged as they were on his last working day. It was from here that the founder of the Soviet Union gave the order for the liquidation of the tsar and his family in Ipatiev House in Sverdlovsk. Stalin also lived and worked in the Kremlin, though having been discredited by Khrushchev for his reign of terror, no museum was ever established in his name. Stalin’s legacy is a series of five giant red stars made from stainless steel and ruby glass, which are located atop the Kremlin towers, replacing the copper two-headed eagles, symbols of imperial Russia, which were there in prerevolutionary times.