Moscow, December 25, 1991

was about to announce the most radical reform in seventy years of totalitarian communism, the introduction of a form of managed democracy that would enable direct elections to a Congress of People’s Deputies. He was doing this in the face of widespread resistance to perestroika by party apparatchiks who saw their sinecures threatened.

And here was this disrespectful braggart from Sverdlovsk accusing him of maintaining the old ways.

When he came back to the room, Gorbachev let fly at Yeltsin in a sustained harangue that lasted more than thirty minutes. Yeltsin’s reproofs were “loud and vacuous,” he cried angrily. He never did anything but offer destructive criticism, and many people in Moscow were complaining about his “rudeness, lack of objectivity, and even cruelty.” According to Yeltsin it was “a tirade that had nothing to do with the substance of my comments, but was aimed at me personally,” with the general secretary swearing at him in “almost market porter’s language.”

The tough construction engineer and scourge of Moscow’s party hacks was crushed by Gorbachev’s furious response. When the lecture was over, Yeltsin apologized lamely, saying, “I’ve learned my lesson, and I think that it was not too soon.”

He later reflected, “There can be no doubt that at that moment Gorbachev simply hated me.”

Chapter 6 DECEMBER 25: MIDMORNING

In contrast to the Kremlin, the Russian White House is already crackling with activity on the morning of December 25, 1991. The imposing ten-year-old edifice of marble and glass, constructed in the shape of a giant submarine with a fourteen-story conning tower, is headquarters of the Russian government. The building has been a symbol of national resistance to totalitarianism since the failed August coup, when Yeltsin stood on a tank outside to defy the hard-line communists attempting to impose emergency rule and keep the Soviet Union intact. It contains the Russian Supreme Soviet, the parliament elected the previous year in the first free vote in Russia since the founding of the USSR. Before that the White House was dismissed by cynical Muscovites as a white elephant, housing a sham government and parliament, whose members were handpicked by the party and who rubber- stamped everything put in front of them. It is now home to a lively, fractious elected assembly that only two weeks ago voted, on Yeltsin’s urging, to take Russia out of the dying Soviet Union by the end of the year.

Visitors climbing the terraced steps are greeted by a magnificent depiction of the imperial two-headed, red- tongued eagle of tsarist Russia rather than, as before, the giant statue of Lenin standing in a recess in the hall, which is still there but which has been shrouded by curtains. In the reception rooms the large pictures of the Soviet founder that were once obligatory have been replaced with reproduction landscapes of silver birch and snow. The Russian tricolor flutters gaily from the roof, and little replica flags adorn the desks of the ministers inside. The cafeteria, so well-stocked in the days before the party system of privileges broke down, still manages to supply deputies and parliamentary staff with bread and sausage. Even in the White House, however, the shortages are evident. The ornate blue-tiled bathrooms on the fifth floor often do not have any lavatory paper; parliamentary deputies are suspected of pocketing the toilet rolls that are installed first thing in the morning and taking them home.[40]

Boris Yeltsin enters from the basement car park and takes the private lift to his spacious office on the fifth floor. There his aide Viktor Ilyushin has laid out on his desk the December 25 editions of the Russian newspapers. A dry apparatchik in his early forties, Ilyushin has been Yeltsin’s assistant since Sverdlovsk days. Over the years he has learned to bear patiently the brunt of his boss’s sometimes petulant outbursts. He always arrives first to prepare the day’s schedule and present Yeltsin with the most important documents.

The broadsheets devote considerable space to a series of fresh presidential decrees signed by Yeltsin the previous day, taking over departments and properties from the defunct Soviet government.

Where the Soviet Union was established by sword and gun, it is being dismantled by decree. In the previous two months Yeltsin has been appropriating Soviet assets simply by signing one decree after another. He undermined the demoralized USSR government by first withholding Russian taxes and then taking ownership of Soviet government ministries and the currency mint. All that Mikhail Gorbachev is left with are titles, a small staff, and the nuclear suitcase.

Before Gorbachev’s glasnost, the newspapers were dull, mendacious, and heavily censored. The main organs of information, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda and the government newspaper Izvestia printed only what the party allowed. Pravda and Izvestia translated as “truth” and “news,” and cynics would quip that “in the Truth there is no news, and in the News there is no truth.” Today they are full of free-wheeling reportage. It is the time of the greatest press freedom in Russian history, before or since. “At the end of 1991 Russia had the most free press probably in the world,” in the opinion of Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister. “It was free from official control. It was free from censorship. It was free from the opinion of the readers. It was free from the owners. Of course it could not survive.”[41] Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper) is one of the most popular dailies for its investigative reporting, a great journalistic novelty for Russian readers. Kommersant (Businessman) has reappeared for the first time since the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, its name deliberately spelled in prerevolutionary style to show it has outlasted the communist era. Pravda, once the infallible mouthpiece of the Communist Party—it always had to be put on top of the pile of daily newspapers for sale—is struggling to survive and has seen its circulation drop from almost ten million to less than one million. Its youth equivalent, Komsomolskaya Pravda, previously the organ of the now-defunct Young Communist League or Komsomol, has transformed itself into a lively news sheet. Its cheeky city counterpart, Moskovsky Komsomolets, has become so irreverent that a year ago it relegated the news of Gorbachev’s Nobel Peace Prize to page three, below the fold. The other papers on Yeltsin’s desk include the more solid Izvestia, the former Soviet government newspaper, now the most reliable high-circulation Russian daily; Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russian Gazette), the organ of the Russian parliament; Sovetskaya Rossiya (Soviet Russia), the herald of the reactionaries; and Trud (Labor), the newspaper of the Soviet trade unions, which has seen its circulation collapse from a world record twenty-one million the year before to under two million.

All the newspapers report that the Russian parliament has the previous day approved a resolution freeing up prices on January 2. Izvestia warns in a headline: “Prices for Bread, Milk, Sugar, Vodka, Medicine, Fuel, Electricity, Rents, Fares Can Rise by Three to Five Times.” Its report says: “To use a well-known expression about democracy, free prices is the worst method of relations between buyers and sellers—if you disregard all the others.”

One of Yeltsin’s decrees listed in today’s Rossiyskaya Gazeta disbands the KGB, which is in the process of being transformed into the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB, the federal security agency of Russia, which will be based like its predecessor in the Lubyanka. Another orders the conversion to Russian ownership of the communist-era USSR State Bank. Izvestia reports that the chief executive, Vitaly Gerashchenko, has submitted his resignation. “It has not yet been accepted, but this is obviously only a matter of a few days, or maybe hours.” This cornerstone of the Soviet Union’s economy will in future prop up a new Russian financial system.

The newspaper also reports that Yeltsin has ordered several iconic state properties in Moscow to be transferred immediately from Soviet to Russian ownership. They are the Bolshoi Theatre, the Mali Theatre, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the Lenin Library, the Academy of Arts, Moscow State University, St. Petersburg State University, the State Historical Museum, the Hermitage Museum, the Pushkin Museum of Arts, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Rublyov Museum of Old Russian Culture and Arts, the Anthropological and Ethnographic Museum, the State Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR, the State Museum of Eastern Art, and the Polytechnic Museum. Until now all these institutions were as much the property of the other Soviet republics as that of Russia. They can do little about their seizure by Russia, except to lay claim to Soviet property on their own territories. The list is topped by the most prestigious property in the whole of the Soviet Union. This is “the Kremlin and all its