political life. New times were on the way, unpredictable and unfamiliar, in which I had to find a place for myself.”[64]
In four years Gorbachev had presided over an extraordinary liberalization of Soviet society. People could march, demonstrate, vote in elections, criticize the party, and enjoy a much freer press. By doing so he had, however, unleashed forces that threatened to destroy the party he led. Elected deputies would inevitably respond to the people who voted for them rather than members of an increasingly unpopular Communist Party apparatus. The conservatives trying to hold him back had no alternative policy, other than a return to the old ways, which meant repression and stagnation.
The People’s Congress opened on May 25, 1989, in the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin. The ten days of debates were televised live on Gorbachev’s orders. He was stunned by the anger and vitriol that poured forth. On the first day viewers heard attacks on the KGB, criticism of Raisa, and calls for the removal of Lenin’s body from the Red Square Mausoleum. Siberian writer Valentin Rasputin electrified everyone by suggesting that Russia should one day leave the Union.
Deprived for so long of the right to even listen to such criticisms without risking arrest, people across the eleven time zones of the Soviet Union could not tear themselves away from their radios and televisions. Three years after emerging from exile as a dissident, Andrey Sakharov, selected as a deputy for the Academy of Sciences, was able to broadcast to the nation his call for a federal structure to replace the Soviet Union, in order to end the oppression suffered under the Stalinist model. There was outrage across the country when Gorbachev cut off the microphone as Sakharov was calling for a repeal of Article 6 of the Soviet constitution, which guaranteed the leading role of the Communist Party. Though Sakharov had run well over his time, many never forgave Gorbachev this one act of censorship, stilling the voice of conscience that had been silenced for years.
Gorbachev had nevertheless achieved a truly amazing feat in liberalizing debate about the future in a country where people had been gagged for most of the century. For the first time all the opposing and disparate elements of Soviet political life gathered in one place, free to say what they liked: hard-line communists, former dissidents, military officers, workers, scientists, academics, and intellectuals, not to mention a few Orthodox bishops and Muslim muftis.
Deputies and journalists mixed freely in the huge airy foyer draped with hanging ferns and at a gigantic buffet with one hundred and forty tables laden with savories and attended by two hundred and eighty waiters in identical white suits and bow ties. Dazed Politburo members found themselves besieged when they appeared among the crowd. The secretive Soviet leadership was suddenly accessible and diminished by being seen in the flesh.
The Congress was still subservient to the party and its leader, however. Hundreds of old-style communists had got themselves elected by posing as democrats. Historian Yury Afanasyev termed the body “Stalinist- Brezhnevite” in its overall makeup. Yeltsin preferred to term it “Gorbachevian, faithfully reflecting our chairman’s inconsistency, timidity, love of half measures and semi-decisions.”[65]
When it came to the election by the Congress members of a supreme soviet, a smaller body that would meet regularly to consider legislation, Yeltsin was consequently overlooked. Crowds came out on the streets of Moscow in a spontaneous protest. A deputy from Siberia, Alexey Kazannik, offered to give up his Supreme Soviet place to make way for Yeltsin. In the end, Gorbachev realized that denying the politician with the biggest single electoral mandate would make the Congress look ridiculous and ultimately bent the rules to allow what Yeltsin called a “castling” measure to take his seat in the upper body.
Nothing was the same for Soviet citizens after the sturm und drang of the Kremlin sessions. “On the day the Congress opened they were one sort of people,” observed Yeltsin. “On the day it closed, they were a different people. However negatively we assess the final result… the most important thing was achieved. Almost the entire population was awakened from its lethargy.”[66]
Yeltsin himself became a different person through his exposure to the radical reformers who gathered around him in the Kremlin foyer. Andrey Sakharov especially made a strong impression. Sakharov did not like Yeltsin, but he saw in him a leader for the emerging democrats, one who had a level of support among the proletariat to which members of the intelligentsia could not aspire. The Congress marked the real start of Yeltsin’s political evolution from communist “stormer” to anticommunist democrat.
Gorbachev noted how unhappy his Politburo comrades were about the whole exercise. “How could it be otherwise, when it was already clear to everybody that the days of party dictatorship were over!”[67]
From his exile in Vermont, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the chronicler of the gulag, saw a flicker of hope for his native land. “Russia lies utterly ravaged and poisoned; its people are in a state of unprecedented humiliation, and are on the brink of perishing physically, perhaps even biologically,” he noted. Now, however, “having lived through these seventy lethal years inside communism’s iron shell, we are crawling out, though barely alive.”[68]
When he went for his summer vacation at Foros on the Black Sea, Mikhail Gorbachev mused aloud to Raisa about his future, wondering whether he should step aside. Now that people had got such a great measure of freedom, let others show that they know how to use it, he suggested. He was not serious, but Raisa was, perhaps sensing what lay ahead. “It’s time, Mikhail Sergeyevich,” she said, “to devote yourself to private life, to retire and write your memoirs. You’ve done your job.”[69]
Chapter 10
DECEMBER 25: MIDDAY
In the Kremlin, after his lunch of small open-faced salami sandwiches and cottage cheese with sour cream, Mikhail Gorbachev is overwhelmed with tiredness and the enormity of what he has to do in a few hours.[70] At the back of his office, behind the work table, is a door leading to a small resting room. Inside are a bed and washing facilities. Gorbachev goes in, shuts the door, and lies down to rest.
Anatoly Chernyaev and Andrey Grachev find the president’s office empty when they enter shortly afterwards with a sheaf of farewell letters for him to sign. They have been dictated by Gorbachev and are addressed to foreign presidents, prime ministers, and royalty. The recipients comprise an A list of current and former world leaders whom he has met and befriended during his years in office: George H. W. Bush, Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterrand, John Major, Giulio Andreotti, Bria n Mulroney, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the heads of the governments of Korea, Finland, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Iran, and Norway. Gorbachev has worked hard to get the tone and content of the letters right. The warm relationship with his counterparts abroad is most important to the Soviet president. It is a measure of his international standing, a recognition of what he has achieved in reforming the Soviet Union, and an assurance of global approval for lessening world tensions, reversing the nuclear arms race, allowing the Berlin Wall to fall, and letting Eastern European countries have their freedom.
Chernyaev knocks on the door of the resting room. It takes Gorbachev five minutes to compose himself and come out. He looks fresh and fit, but his eyes are teary. Grachev notes a slight redness, caused either by lack of sleep or perhaps the shedding of a few tears provoked by the tension of the final days. The president settles into his high-backed leather chair and carefully reads the letters one by one before signing each with a felt pen. Chernyaev leaves to have them dispatched.
Grachev takes the opportunity to show Gorbachev the front page of
