In the wake of the Russian parliament’s declaration of sovereignty in June 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had the option of trying to destroy each other or of entering into a political alliance. Something drastic had to be done. The Soviet economy was on the point of collapse. There were now chronic shortages of everything in the Russian capital. Even cigarettes had become scarce, and there were minor tobacco riots in several cities. The longest queues that summer were at photographers’ studios, as Muscovites were obliged to apply for identity cards for city stores to prevent country people stripping the shelves bare. Ration coupons were issued for clothes, shoes, and domestic appliances. Sugar was restricted to two kilograms per month per person. Butter was rarely seen. Flour and salt disappeared from the shops, and bread ran out daily. Meat was only available in expensive markets. Consumers were hoarding, making the shortages worse.
People told bitter anecdotes about how bad things had become. A forgetful old man stands outside a supermarket with an empty shopping bag, wondering if he has done his shopping or not. Many jokes were aimed at party privileges. In Congress a deputy complains to the presidium, “I want to work like I do under communism and live like under capitalism,” and is told, “No problem! Join us on the platform.” A Russian moves to Latvia in the hope that one day he will wake up abroad (he soon does). Another anecdote doing the rounds goes: “How does a clever Russian Jew talk to a foolish Russian Jew? By telephone from New York.”
The humiliation of Russians at their degraded state was compounded by the arrival of food parcels from Germany, the country the Soviet Union defeated in World War II. Praskoviya Fyodorovna, age seventy-eight, who had served as a wireless operator in the war, wept as she opened a typical cardboard box sent by a family in Dusseldorf. It contained a tin of cocoa, three slim bars of milk chocolate, two bulky slabs of Edel marzipan, a packet of wafer biscuits, a kilo of Diamant flour, and packages of sugar and rice. “And now they help the victorious,” she sobbed.[108]
In Moscow the people standing in line reacted with indifference, even anger, when on October 15, 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leading role in the easing of tensions between East and West and the freedoms gained by Eastern Europe. As far as they were concerned, their lot had worsened while their leader was feeding his ego on the back-slapping international circuit. In an extraordinary swipe at his president, Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov told reporters, “We must remember this certainly was not the prize for economics.”[109]
At first the rivals chose to enter into an alliance to meet the crisis. The command system having failed so catastrophically, Gorbachev and Yeltsin agreed to cooperate on a crash program to create a market economy. The task of drawing up a blueprint was given to a joint working group led by radical economist Stanislav Shatalin, a balding adviser to Gorbachev with a quick sense of humor who referred to himself as the Diego Maradona of economics, and Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister, Grigory Yavlinsky. Gorbachev and Yeltsin at last had a civilized meeting. For five hours in late August, as the rain beat down incessantly outside the Kremlin, they agreed to implement the forthcoming economic plan together. The Russian leader felt Gorbachev treated him as an equal for the first time. He mollified the Soviet president by declaring that for Russia to go it completely alone would mean destroying the Union, and he had rejected that notion.
The accord between Gorbachev and Yeltsin didn’t last. Gorbachev balked when Shatalin and Yavlinsky produced a five-hundred-day plan similar to the shock therapy applied in Poland earlier in the year. It involved the step-by-step lifting of price and currency controls, withdrawal of state subsidies, and largescale privatization, with October 1, 1990, as the starting date. The Soviet leader caved in to ferocious pressure from the military and industrial sectors, which feared losing their generous subventions, and from party hard-liners who saw in the plan the disintegration of the Soviet Union if the center lost its ability to issue commands to the republics. In mid- October, unable to give up the old Bolshevik notion of the leader as the ultimate social designer, or of himself as the wise compromiser, he reconciled Shatalin’s plan with a reform program drawn up earlier by Soviet Prime Minister Nikolay Ryzhkov. A vain apparatchik known as the “Weeping Bolshevik” for his emotional outbursts, Ryzhkov proposed keeping much of the old system intact and maintaining Kremlin control over all the rights designated for the republics. Gorbachev considered and then ruled out holding a referendum on his compromise.[110]
The radical reformers were furious. Feeling betrayed, Yeltsin called the compromise a blueprint for chaos, saying, “You cannot cross a hedgehog with a snake.”[111] In a speech he threatened that Russia would go ahead and implement the five-hundred-day plan on its own. Outraged, Gorbachev called an emergency meeting of his presidential council in the Kremlin. There was near hysteria over Yeltsin’s threat and the possibility that other republics would follow in defying the center. Chernyaev found the room filled with fear and hatred.[112] Ryzhkov screamed that they would all be shot or hanged, that everything was out of control. At one point Gorbachev left the room briefly to greet a U.S. delegation led by Dick Cheney, switching as he did to the role of garrulous and charming master statesman, and then, as soon as the Americans had gone, continuing his outburst in the corridor against Yeltsin’s people, “who all deserve a good punch in the face.”
Yeltsin had as yet no way of carrying out his threat to go it alone. His departments had little or no resources to implement any economic plan. His industry minister, Viktor Kisin, complained that at the time there was only one person in the ministry—the minister himself, and there was no office, no chair and no telephone. Yeltsin’s helplessness was exposed when his officials placed an order for two armored limousines with the Gorky factory in Moscow in October. The order was refused, on directions from the Kremlin.
The rivals met again in the Kremlin, but another five hours of discussion led nowhere. At the meeting Yeltsin asked, “Why are you moving to the right so sharply?” “Because society is moving to the right,” replied Gorbachev. “You then simply do not know what is happening in society,” retorted Yeltsin. The next day Yeltsin reported the conversation to the Russian parliament, in what Chernyaev described as his usual rude and insulting manner. Gorbachev complained to his aides he would be forced to declare war on Yeltsin.
But Gorbachev was becoming isolated from Soviet society, and Yeltsin had the backing of the people. On November 7, after Gorbachev and his comrades had reviewed the annual military parade in Red Square commemorating the October Revolution, Yeltsin appeared at the head of an anticommunist crowd organized by the radical group Democratic Russia. They carried pictures of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and banners displaying black humor, such as “1917 the crime—1990 the punishment.”
Gorbachev’s knowledge of what was happening in society at this time came principally from his aide, Valery Boldin, who was secretly scheming to subvert his boss. The blandest of bureaucrats, with square face and outsize horn-rimmed spectacles, Boldin wielded great influence over Gorbachev’s diary and routine. Anyone who wanted to see the president had to go through the dogmatic apparatchik whom Gorbachev had recruited from
Boldin in time would admit that he despised Gorbachev “for his lordly manner and contempt for his subordinates.” He had never forgotten the humiliating way his position had been confirmed six years before, when he was summoned into the presence of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev and told that he had lived up to their expectations. An important party official in his own right, Boldin felt he was treated as a servant. Yet he was so successful at hiding the rancor he felt that Raisa was fooled into thinking he was her loyal ally. She would find out before long how wrong she was. Boldin was unpopular with the president’s staff for his oily attitude towards Gorbachev. Chernyaev never spoke warmly of Boldin, and senior secretariat member Olga Lanina couldn’t stand him. Grachev thought he was obsessed with the power that he wielded. One of Boldin’s quirks was collecting books bound in fine-tooled leather that exposed convoluted Masonic conspiracies favored by right-wing extremists. But Boldin lived up to his Bolshevik ideals. He refused the perks of his status, declining a Chaika, access to a special clinic, and a larger dacha, and was contemptuous of the Gorbachevs’ taste for the lavish benefits of office.
The alarmist information that Boldin fed his master came from KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, a sixty-seven- year-old admirer of Stalin who was also posing as a reformer. The short, baby-faced Kryuchkov, nicknamed Cherub by his staff, was a conspiracy theorist with a taste for Chivas Regal who wore a cardigan under his jacket and
