state. He is close to Gorbachev and feels “like his ally, that I was helping him.” It occurs to him that they are both part of a lost generation, born too late to become war veterans and too early to become cosmonauts, for whom Gorbachev is “the figurehead, the main representative of our views, of what we essentially are.” He tells Gorbachev that he remembers him as little short of a dissident at university, though the president thinks this is overstating it. “Obviously I was not a dissident at all,” Gorbachev protests, “although I already felt a burgeoning criticism of our reality.”
Gorbachev tells his old friend, “At this important point in history, the most important thing is to overcome it without blood, without reds fighting whites. Society is pregnant with an explosion. If, God forbid, there is political madness and score settling when people are suffering so much, there will be huge consequences.”[79]
Yegor Yakovlev fears that the Belyaev narrative has little chance of being shown on Russian television because the pro-Yeltsin executives at Gosteleradio are highly sensitive to the perils of paying special attention to Gorbachev. “Television is being taken away from me,” Yakovlev complains helplessly to Gorbachev’s aides. “I am no longer master there. Yeltsin’s people are ruling the roost.”[80]
It was Yegor Yakovlev who recommended that ABC be brought into the heart of the Kremlin in the final days. He advised the president to “pick one foreign network from all those demanding access to a moment of world history.” They settled on ABC
For his part Gorbachev knows how popular he is in the United States and how useful it will be to have the world watching, via the lens of an American television camera, how the transition is being conducted. Who knows how the unpredictable Boris Yeltsin would behave otherwise.
Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, from their different perspectives, see the United States as their ally in the dying days of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev has been cheered on by U.S. President George H. W. Bush, who would prefer the devil he knows—an intact and supplicant Soviet Union—to a chaotic group of new countries, some with nuclear weapons on their territory. Yeltsin is anxious to present the responsible face of the new Russia to the United States, as he needs its assistance to make the historic switch from communism to capitalism. Both are vying to influence American and global opinion for their own purposes and standing.
No one is more surprised than Koppel himself that he has been allowed into the heart of the Kremlin, free to roam around and film in a sanctum of power to which correspondents rarely if ever get access. The chairman of ABC News, Roone Arledge, had sent him to Moscow in mid-December to try to grab an interview with Gorbachev before he resigned, if that was to be his fate. Instead Koppel had been offered exclusive foreign rights to record the last days in office of the Soviet president.
Chernyaev encounters the ABC crew in Gorbachev’s outer office. He thinks how “shameful for us that only foreign television journalists were running around us representing the significance of Gorbachev for the whole world, a significance which the Western public fairly gives him…. If it wasn’t for Yegor Yakovlev bringing in ABC during those last days, who literally lived in the corridors filming everything they came across, there would have been an information blackout up to the very end of his presence in the Kremlin.”[81]
Grachev believes that the president is also very conscious that these last days living in the Kremlin are part of world history and that was why he accepted the argument that it should be recorded for history. The fifty-year-old silver-haired veteran of the Communist Party’s international department has been by Gorbachev’s side since 1985, first as a foreign policy adviser and since the coup in August as his press secretary. He sees a comparison between Koppel and the American communist writer John Reed, who chronicled the 1917 October Revolution in his book
After a couple of days, observed Grachev, Kaplan and Koppel “blended into the walls of the Kremlin so completely that even the guards stopped paying attention to them.” The two Americans are surprised to find that Russian journalists are showing scant interest in Gorbachev’s departure. “They were really nervous being around Gorbachev,” recalled Kaplan. “They knew the Soviet Union was ended. The Soviets were leaving the Kremlin, and the Russians were getting ready to march in, and they wanted to show allegiance to the next government.”
They are also surprised at how little the Soviet president had to do of an official nature in his last days. Once when in the Kremlin with associate ABC producer Holly Petersen, Gorbachev said to Kaplan, “Come in, meet my cabinet.” They were brought into a big room to find his ministers sitting there, and Gorbachev gave him a two-hour interview in their presence. None of it ever got shown on television.
The Americans at first reckoned on being back in the United States for the holidays, but having accepted the Kremlin’s offer of unlimited access, they are at the mercy of history’s timetable. The
Gorbachev later borrows the satellite phone to call his own wife. Kaplan thinks that he takes it because he is wary about using his own telephone in the Kremlin. The Soviet president can trust no one now.
Chapter 11
KNEE DEEP IN KEROSENE
With his name dominating global headlines after his election to the Soviet congress, Boris Yeltsin decided in late summer 1989 that it was time for him to see the world and look at how other systems worked. He accepted an invitation to go on a lecture tour sponsored by the secretive Esalen Institute, a Californian nonprofit “dedicated to the exploration of human potential” whose leaders were close to the U.S. administration.
Visiting America for the first time turned out to be a life-changing experience for Yeltsin, revealing to him the human potential and dynamism of a different ideology.
He was astonished by New York. As a construction expert he was awed at the majestic skyscrapers, and he marveled at the cheapness, quality, and speed of service in the restaurants. He found Americans “wonderfully open, sincere and friendly, industrious and intelligent.” He was mesmerized by the cornucopia of food in Randall’s Grocery Store, a supermarket in Houston, Texas, which he dropped into unannounced with his assistant Lev Sukhanov on his way to the airport after visiting the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. They had never seen such a store. It had 30,000 items, countless varieties of sausage, no queues, and a woman at the checkout reading the prices with a device like a hair dryer. There he had an epiphany. He concluded that the sole purpose of the Iron Curtain was to prevent Soviet citizens knowing what was on the other side, as it would be too much for them to endure.
“Look to what limits we have brought our people,” he complained to Sukhanov as they flew on to Miami, deeply depressed at what he had seen. “We were told fables!” Sukhanov observed that “after Houston, in a plane provided by a millionaire, Yeltsin’s belief in the Bolshevik idea was finally destroyed. During those minutes he decided to leave the party and start fighting for supreme power in Russia.”[85]
Yeltsin’s public lectures in the United States were well received, except for one scheduled at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on September 12. The Russian was drunk when he arrived late on September 11 aboard a private plane supplied by Rockefeller. “It was the most astonishing scene I have ever witnessed,” recalled his host in the United States, Jim Garrison, executive director of Esalen’s Soviet American Exchange Program, which engaged in nongovernmental diplomacy with Soviet counterparts. “The president of Johns Hopkins was there to
