Moscow, December 25, 1991 Read online

  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.”[27]

  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.[28] 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.”[29]

  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.”[30]

  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, lik
e 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.[31] 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.

  Before entering his office Mikhail Gorbachev leaves the television crew and slips into a small room off the corridor, where his hairdresser, a young woman, is waiting to give him his daily grooming.[32] It is a morning ritual of his, especially when something important is to take place, to make sure he looks presidential. The stylist gives his nape and sideburns a slight shave and combs and dries his hair. Today his appearance is more important than usual, because in a few hours he will make a televised address that will be seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

  According to the transition agreement he made with Yeltsin on Monday, Gorbachev can continue to occupy his Kremlin office for another four days, until Sunday. This will allow him time to keep previously arranged appointments, grant a few final interviews, and clear out his desk. Only yesterday Gorbachev had gathered the staff in the Walnut Room close to his office and for the first time informed the forty or fifty men and women gathered there—advisers, assistants, and heads of departments—that he was resigning within twenty-four hours and that they would all have to leave the Kremlin no later than December 29.

  There is some evidence, however, that Yeltsin’s Russian government is growing impatient and that the transition period may not be respected. The president’s spokesman, Andrey Grachev, feels that the appropriate funeral rites for the deceased are being dispensed with and that the new tenants are anxious to move in and are already “pressing the relatives of the departed to vacate the premises.”

  Yeltsin’s guards have started to take over the checkpoints in the Kremlin and position themselves almost menacingly in the shadowy alcoves in the corridors. Until a few days ago, Officer Valery Pestov was head of Gorbachev’s security service, but on December 16 he was told that he had been transferred to Yeltsin’s command. Gorbachev only found this out when told by a secretary. New security personnel and ushers have taken the place of the regular sentinels. The incoming masters have ordered Gorbachev’s staff not to lock their office doors or their desk drawers and to keep open the enormous burgundy-colored filing cabinets in the corridor. They have begun stopping his officials to search their belongings and ascertain what is being carried in and out.

  The Soviet president passes the checkpoints without hindrance, but some of his aides and junior officials are regularly delayed and harassed. When an overeager sentry demands to inspect the briefcase of Ruslan Aushev, chairman of the Commission on Afghan Affairs and a Hero of the Soviet Union, later the president of Ingushetia, Aushev slaps him in the face. Stunned, the guard lets him pass. Vitaly Gusenkov, a Gorbachev aide, is detained for some time and only released when he threatens loudly to complain directly to the president.

  Gorbachev’s most senior adviser, Anatoly Chernyaev, is able to take his brief case past the new guards without hindrance; he believes they respect him as a sort of elder statesman. By this means he manages to take some sensitive documents out of the Kremlin. But he has no illusions about what is going on. The Russian president wants to torture his predecessor with petty humiliations, he reckons. It all smacks of banditry in the spirit of Yeltsin, “and Mikhail Sergeyevich still insists on a civilized transfer of power!”[33]

  The Kremlin receptionists have come in at their usual time, but practically all that remains for them to do is to sort out the personal books Gorbachev is taking away and discard old papers. There are no longer any attendants in his cloakrooms. No telephones are ringing, insisting to be answered. Yeltsin has taken charge of all government communications and disconnected most lines. One of the five white phones by Gorbachev’s desk is still connected, but it, too, is mostly silent.

  Chernyaev discovers that the dedicated telephone in his office along the corridor has been assigned to someone else. He can still use the telephone to dial out, “but someone called, and it is not for me.” One message does get through to him. Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister, Gennady Burbulis, calls to inform him, in his high-pitched, precise voice, that he must wind things down sharply. Burbulis, it seems, has earmarked Chernyaev’s space for himself and is impatient to move in.

  Shortly before 10:30 a.m., refreshed and slightly scented from his hairdresser’s attention, Gorbachev enters his presidential office past the cramped reception area where the secretaries and bodyguards sit, and walks across the carpeted parquet floor to take his customary seat in the high-backed leather chair behind his desk. It is a big, gloomy room, forty feet long and twenty feet wide, with wainscoting and a high ceiling. White damask drapes hang over the windows, and a six-foot-high bookcase takes up half of an adjoining wall. On one side are a worktable and a low coffee table with easy chairs, where he relaxes with visitors. Gorbachev’s desk of dark cherrywood with solid top and base is in the corner by the window. Behind it stands a ceiling-high red Soviet flag. In front of the desk are two adjacent leather armchairs, which self-important visitors try to avoid. Sitting in them means having to look up at the president behind his desk. In the corner is a safe containing top secret documents and some personal items, including a Makarov pistol with gold inlay that he received as a present from Viktor Chebrikov, head of the KGB from 1982 to 1988.

  Off the anteroom is the Walnut Room, where major decisions were until recently made by Gorbachev and a select few communist leaders, often with no note takers present, to be ratified in the adjoining Politburo Room. The Politburo Room was once Stalin’s office. It is often referred to as the “shoe room” because the table is shaped like the sole of a shoe. It has not been used since the party was outlawed and the Politburo disbanded after the August coup. On the table rests a control console that opens a special wall panel to expose a series of maps, which are also redundant. Many city and street names and even the titles of the fifteen Soviet-era republics have reverted to their prerevolutionary forms in the past year, and from today the almost invisible dotted lines between the republics will become solid international borders with customs and immigration posts.

  The two colonels with the nuclear suitcase have, as always, followed the president into the reception room attached to his office. They place the black object with sharp metal corners on a table so that it is in view. If there is a nuclear alert, a light will flash. This has never happened since the chemodanchik was invented in 1983, in the final phases of the Cold War, to provide Soviet leaders with a remote communications system to minimize reaction time should a missile be detected heading towards the USSR. The device has never left Gorbachev’s side since 1985. In an emergency the top leaders can converse with each other and with the strategic forces command center at Chekhov, a small town outside Moscow linked to the Kremlin by a secret KGB subway known as Moscow Metro II. If one leader should be incapacitated by a nuclear strike, two others can authorize retaliatory action.

  Occasionally the colonels have taken Gorbachev through the procedure, showing how in an emergency the president can monitor the trajectory of a suspect missile on a screen inside the case linked into the Soviet Union’s command and control network, Kazbek, and converse with the defense minister and strategic comman
d center by satellite telephone. The system was designed to respond to the U.S. Pershing medium-range ballistic missile, which has a sevenminute trajectory. By pressing one of a row of buttons inside the suitcase, the president can approve different kinds of reactions, from a limited reprisal to nuclear Armageddon.

  Contrary to popular belief, the three nuclear suitcases do not contain the codes necessary to unlock the safety mechanisms on nuclear missiles. The president can authorize access to these codes, however. If all the briefcase holders are killed in an attack, officers of the general staff have codes to launch counterstrikes on their own initiative.

  Andrey Grachev notes that besides the two colonels, the normally bustling anteroom is strangely empty. Not a single visitor is present, other than the Americans from ABC television. The appointments diary is blank.

  Gorbachev’s English-language interpreter, Pavel Palazchenko, finds the Kremlin corridors “hushed, even more quiet than usual” as he arrives and walks along the corridor to his cubicle-sized office filled with dictionaries. The interpreter, whose bald head and moustache are often seen over Gorbachev’s shoulder at international gatherings, senses an air of inevitability about what is happening in the Kremlin, where he has never felt at home since Gorbachev moved his presidential staff here from party headquarters in Old Square some months ago.

  Palazchenko also senses something hostile in the building. It is as if, he feels, “the environment itself is trying to eject us.”

  Chapter 5

  THE STORMING OF MOSCOW