Much was also made in the American media of a cold war between Raisa and Nancy Reagan, wife of President Reagan. The former actress found the Marxist-Leninist lady hard going. “She never stopped talking, or lecturing to be more accurate.” Nancy was taken aback when Raisa “snapped her fingers to summon her KGB guards” to get a different chair. “I couldn’t believe it. I had met first ladies, princesses and queens, but I had never seen anybody act this way.”[130]
Raisa developed a much warmer relationship with Barbara Bush, though George Bush had difficulty appreciating her deadpan humor. At a dinner in the Soviet embassy in Washington, the U.S. president joked to Raisa, as they were being entertained by a very overweight and unpretty Russian opera singer, “I think I’m falling in love.” “You’d better not,” she scolded him. “Remember Gary Hart!” Bush concluded that she had been briefed on the scandal surrounding the former senator and presidential candidate and that she was not kidding.[131] Bush invited Jane Fonda, Van Cliburn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Dizzy Gillespie, and other celebrities to a lunch in the White House after the Soviet embassy made it known Raisa wanted to meet stars of show business.
Raisa broke new ground by becoming the first Soviet leader’s wife to engage in charitable work. She notably donated $100,000 in royalties from her husband’s books in 1990 to improve Russia’s treatment of childhood leukemia, and she became an active patron of a children’s hospital in Moscow. But she always maintained a reserve about her private life and endured the negative press in dignified silence. “Why should I talk about myself?” she told family friend Georgy Pryakhin, who was engaged to record a series of conversations with her for a short, sentimental book called
The book has just been published and no doubt has come to the attention of the Russian president, which goes some way to explaining his harsh actions towards her just when her husband is about to resign. Without naming him, she singles out Yeltsin and his acolytes for particular scorn in its pages. They are party men who for thirty years expounded the merits of “barrack-room socialism” and were in charge of building society, and then announced that “they will gladly destroy it all and set about its destruction.” She is scathing about how easily some former comrades have changed their coats and how “yesterday’s energetic propagandist for atheism today vows eternal loyalty to Christian dogmas.”[133]
Valery Boldin would later characterize Raisa as tough, harsh, domineering, and fussy, an imperious first lady who delivered barbs and humiliating lectures to those working for her. According to him she had no qualms about issuing orders over the phone to the general secretary’s aides and to several members of the government. He seemed to enjoy her company at times, however, and related how they shared the pleasure of surreptitiously sipping red wine together on an international flight at the height of the anti-alcohol campaign. But he wrote that he recoiled when on the same flight she tried to order Gorbachev’s aides, whose allegiance was first and foremost to the party, to swear an oath of loyalty to her husband. They all declined.
In the opinion of the president’s interpreter, Pavel Palazchenko, who helped her with the English-language edition of
Gorbachev’s distress at Yeltsin’s treatment of his wife on their last day as the Soviet Union’s first couple is deepened by his knowledge of a truth they have obscured from the world, that Raisa is at the end of her tether. The drama of their life is something that “ultimately she is not able to bear.” He acknowledges in time that she is a vulnerable person. “She was strong, but she had to endure a great deal.”[134] Only two decades later does he disclose how ill she is at the time. After the August coup “she had a massive fit, or rather a micro stroke,” he tells the newspaper
Gorbachev calls Raisa back and assures her that no one will intrude further into their state dacha that day. Still red in the face with anger after he replaces the receiver, he laments to his colleagues, “What a disgrace! Can you imagine, it was the living space for the family for seven years. We have several hundred if not thousands of books there. We would need time to pack them all.” He has little but contempt for the people around Yeltsin and for those who denounced the communists for their system of privileges and are now jostling each other “like hogs at a trough.”
The eviction orders, delivered even before he has stepped down, make it clear to Gorbachev that he can no longer trust Yeltsin to honor the commitments in the transition package negotiated between them two days ago. He has to be prepared for more humiliations before the day is out.
It takes some minutes for him to calm down over the action of “those jerks” and turn his mind again to the farewell address he is to give in three and a half hours. When he recovers his composure, Gorbachev turns to Grachev and says, “You know, Andrey, the fact that they’re acting this way makes me certain that I am right.”[136]
Chapter 15
HIJACKING BARBARA BUSH
After the debacle in the Baltics in January 1991, Gorbachev realized he had to compromise with the republics if he was to have any chance of saving the Soviet Union. Force would not work. It only fueled nationalist sentiment, went against his nature, and threatened to destroy his legacy as a democratic reformer—not to mention slamming the door on the billions of dollars in international credits he was seeking to restructure the economy.
Therefore he invited Yeltsin and the leaders of the other fourteen Soviet republics to meet him on April 23 at Novo-Ogarevo, an estate with several fine buildings set in a pine grove high on the banks of the Moscow River. The aim would be to discuss a future union with more power devolved to the republics. Nine of them accepted his invitation, including Yeltsin.
The “nine plus one” group—nine republic leaders plus Gorbachev—gathered in a second-floor room of a reception house constructed in the style of a nineteenth-century manor. Gorbachev sat at the top of a long table on which were placed four slim microphones to amplify his voice. Behind him the Soviet flag hung from a twelve-foot- high stand, and a heavily bearded Karl Marx observed the proceedings from a portrait on the wall over Gorbachev’s shoulder. The Soviet president was in a conciliatory mood. He said that he was ready to sign a draft union treaty giving real sovereignty to the republics, and that after a new Soviet constitution was adopted, he would dissolve the Congress of People’s Deputies and hold direct elections for the post of Soviet president.
Now in a position to make, rather than demand, concessions, Yeltsin responded in kind and dropped his insistence on full Russian sovereignty—which he was as yet unable to implement in any case. After a daylong discussion, Gorbachev dictated a statement, which the nine presidents signed, noting that they were all prepared to work together on a new union treaty. They retired for dinner and toasts to a new beginning. For Gorbachev it was a load off his mind, “and a glimmer of hope emerged.” Yeltsin felt “warmed and excited” after the lengthy session.
Nevertheless, the new civility between Gorbachev and Yeltsin did not extend beyond the drawing rooms and lawns of Novo-Ogarevo. Yeltsin’s political ambitions were soaring. To no one’s surprise, he announced that he would run for president of the Russian republic in the groundbreaking election for which he had got a mandate on the back of Gorbachev’s referendum. Gorbachev professed to be neutral but took steps to undermine Yeltsin’s chances. Oleg Shenin, a Central Committee secretary, claimed that Gorbachev, who often referred to Yeltsin as “unbalanced,” repeatedly gave him an assignment to locate some documentation about Yeltsin’s health. During the campaign the KGB provided Gorbachev with transcripts of Yeltsin’s conversations with his security chief, Alexander Korzhakov, at a Moscow tennis club. The pleasant lady at the club who insisted on giving them postmatch refreshments in her office ensured that they lingered within range of the KGB microphones installed there.
Yeltsin realized that without access to television he was at a disadvantage compared to a candidate with the
