Like many world leaders, Gorbachev has gotten out of the habit of reading the newspapers himself, preferring that his subordinates provide him with what he needs to know, thus protecting him from negative coverage. Under glasnost, censorship was relaxed, and newspapers became more daring. Now they provide freewheeling news and commentary, and much of it is insulting to the outgoing president.
Gorbachev has not yet been shown that day’s editions, and Chernyaev decides not to upset him by disclosing that they reveal in humiliating detail several aspects of his personal affairs. A report in
“Regarding Gorbachev’s conditions of retirement,” the writer states, “Yeltsin announced the following: He will be given a pension equivalent to today’s salary, indexed for inflation; he will be given a state dacha but not the one he is in; he will have two state cars and a twenty-strong staff, including security, drivers, and service. After a vacation he will start his activities in the Gorbachev fund.”
A commentary in the newspaper rubs it in: “Gorbachev induced chaos, which destroyed the doomed empire… and has to pay for it by being withdrawn from the post without pity or sorrow from his fellow politicians and the Soviet people.”
Chernyaev is furious that Yeltsin has leaked—and distorted—the details of his private dealings with Gorbachev. The Russian president had blabbed to editors to let the world know how generous and considerate his behavior is towards his defeated adversary and how “civilized” his last meeting with Gorbachev had been—a nine- hour session on Monday at which they hammered out the terms of Gorbachev’s departure from political life. The reports say that Gorbachev was too demanding and Yeltsin had to reduce “by ten times,” from two hundred to twenty, the number of staff he wanted to retain. The claim “is a lie because Gorbachev didn’t ask for two hundred people,” Chernyaev writes in his diary. There are other things “in the same nasty style.”[73] It adds insult to injury, he feels, that the amount of Gorbachev’s pension has been bandied about, apparently with unconcealed relish, among the leaders of the republics, former allies who used to show Gorbachev deference but who now regard him with contempt. Some wanted to give him nothing.
He is also privately dumbfounded by the way Gorbachev, too, is portraying his last conversation with Yeltsin on Monday as civilized. It is an illusion, Chernyaev believes, to talk about that meeting, as Gorbachev does, as if it had been conducted in a normal fashion, as if between comrades, and “
The “RAND-type corporation” is the foundation that Gorbachev plans to set up after retirement and that will in fact provide jobs for Chernyaev and other senior members of his staff after they leave the Kremlin.
The Kremlin staff know that Gorbachev is already a wealthy man. One day last week he stunned Chernyaev and Alexander Yakovlev by confiding to them that he had received an $800,000 advance from a German publisher for his autobiography,
Gorbachev is well aware of his money-raising powers. On a visit to South Korea in April, President Roh Tae- woo proffered, and he accepted, an envelope containing $100,000, an extraordinary act on both their parts at a first meeting. Gorbachev gave the money to his chief of staff, Valery Boldin, for transfer to a children’s hospital.[76] He knows that after his retirement there will be an avalanche of requests for well-paid appearances and lectures from around the world.
Chernyaev, a war veteran with full moustache under a pudgy nose, feels the indignities of being forced from office as much as Gorbachev. Like his boss, he is also about to become unemployed he believes. The ultimate loyal insider, he sees Gorbachev every day, plying him with memos on personnel and policy matters, sitting in on meetings with foreign leaders and taking notes, free to speak his mind and criticize. Always cheerful, never ruffled, he is the only official whom the very private Gorbachevs have taken regularly to their vacation dacha at Foros on the Black Sea, where he has ghostwritten much of Gorbachev’s books and essays extolling his reforms. The president’s English-language interpreter, Pavel Palazchenko, regards Chernyaev as the unsung hero of perestroika. Chernyaev’s pro-reform views were shaped during three years working in Czechoslovakia, where he saw Soviet tanks turning back the tide of reform in 1968.
Leaving his Kremlin post means losing much more than income for the seventy-year-old Chernyaev. He no longer will have the opportunity to combine family life at his home in Vesnina Street near Moscow University on the city’s western outskirts with visits to his mistress, Lyudmila Pavlovna, who lives conveniently close to the Kremlin in Malaya Gruzinskaya Street. Late in the evening, “having dropped off milk at home and having lied about where I was going,” Chernyaev would regularly hurry off to be with his beloved Lyuda. All he ever wanted, he notes in his diary, was to have a good life.
He sees an irony in the fact that the coming of political freedom for Russia means a loss of his personal freedom to spend time with his lover. “I have to get used to ‘freedom,’” he writes in his diary. “But you can’t be free when you have family…. Would that I had enough strength to spit at everything and go to the woman I love, but the woman would want me always to be cheerful and assured, she would want me to have a good job, she would not want me to be like a dependant, or a poor person who comes for consolation.” He is also wary of competition for his mistress. Alexander Bovin, just dispatched to Israel by Gorbachev as the last Soviet ambassador, also tried to court Lyuda but, writes Chernyaev with satisfaction, “with little success.”
Chernyaev is as licentious as his master is prudish. In 1972 he accompanied Gorbachev, then a young regional party secretary, on a trip to Amsterdam and dragged him to sex shops and into an adult cinema to watch an X-rated movie. Gorbachev “was embarrassed by what he saw, perhaps even revolted.” The future party leader kept tugging his aide’s sleeve and insisted instead on talking about how to fix the problems in Stavropol.[77]
Lyuda is the final passion of the lothario who works with Gorbachev, the last woman who, as he puts it, graciously allows him one-night stands. Several years after leaving the Kremlin, the aging mandarin with high testosterone levels will publish a treatise about his obsession with the opposite sex, called
Yegor Yakovlev (no relation to Alexander Yakovlev) arrives in the Senate Building to help supervise the media coverage of Gorbachev’s resignation address. The former editor of the weekly
Aware of the historical importance of recording Gorbachev’s last hours as president, Yakovlev has brought veteran Russian writer and filmmaker Igor Belyaev into the Kremlin to make his own documentary alongside the small ABC television crew.
Belyaev and Gorbachev have known each other since they were at Moscow State University together. The documentary maker is deeply appreciative of what his fellow alumnus has achieved in liberalizing the communist
