the derisive laughter of the journalists from the broadcast of the press conference.[173]
Gorbachev fired Kravchenko as head of state television, brushing aside his excuse that he had no alternative but to obey the emergency committee as Gosteleradio was under the guns of the KGB. The president asked his one-time friend Yegor Yakovlev, to whom he had not spoken for nearly a year, to take his place. The progressive former
One of Yegor Yakovlev’s priorities was to get Gorbachev onto international news broadcasts to demonstrate that he was still in business as Soviet leader. He found willing allies in CNN and ABC, which were competing in the aftermath of the coup to get access to Yeltsin and Gorbachev. Both presidents agreed to a request from ABC to appear at a joint televised “town hall” meeting in Moscow on Monday, September 2, conducted by Peter Jennings, to be shown in both Russia and the United States.
When ABC News president Roone Arledge boasted publicly that “this historic live broadcast will provide a forum for Americans from every part of the country to ask questions of these two leaders at this critical period of history,” the competitive CNN president, Tom Johnson, and Eason Jordan took the next flight from Atlanta to Moscow on August 29 to “snag the interviews.” To their delight, Yegor Yakovlev made Gorbachev available a day before the scheduled ABC program for an exclusive half-hour interview, conducted by Steve Hurst and also shown on Soviet television.
The interview was an opportunity for Gorbachev to boast of the restoration of his political fortunes. That day he had convened a meeting of the presidents of ten of the fifteen original Soviet republics, including Yeltsin, and they had agreed to form themselves into a state council, with Gorbachev at its head, that would revive talks on a new union treaty.
He was taking control again, he insisted. His new alliance with Yeltsin, he told CNN’s Hurst, was “unbreakable.”
Chapter 18
DECEMBER 25: DUSK
With less than sixty minutes left before his resignation address, Mikhail Gorbachev is at last mentally and physically ready. His speech has been printed out for him in large letters to read on air. He is satisfied that he has found the right tone to express his disappointment and feelings of betrayal by Yeltsin in a dignified manner.
While waiting, he gives Ted Koppel the benefit of a few more of his thoughts. Then as the ABC team goes out into the Kremlin corridor, he signals to Yegor Yakovlev and Andrey Grachev to stay. “Let’s have coffee,” he says.
The three sit at the oval table where Gorbachev likes to chat with visitors. Zhenya, the waiter, brings in a tray with coffee, pastries, and small open sandwiches.
Grachev senses that Gorbachev does not want to be left alone “with his thoughts, his undelivered speech and the nuclear suitcase which he would soon have to give up.”[174]
They discuss whether Gorbachev should sign his decree resigning the presidency of the Soviet Union before giving his televised address, or vice versa. Yakovlev advises him to do it after. He thinks it better that everyone watching television sees him doing it. It would add a moment of drama and finality. The more formalism there is to the event, the more it will be seen as a dignified exit.
They are all rather disheartened by the fact that no ceremony has been arranged by the incoming authorities for the first peaceful transition of power in Russian history.
As they sip their coffee, the conversation of the three men spontaneously turns to their apprehensions about what might happen to them in the future.
The fate of Nicolae Ceausescu is not far from their minds. Two years ago—to the day—the Romanian communist leader and his wife, Elena, were executed by firing squad after an uprising against his totalitarian rule. Gorbachev regarded Ceausescu with contempt as the “Romanian fuhrer,” but they had maintained a high-profile relationship. Twenty days before the execution, Gorbachev had told Ceausescu, who was visiting Moscow, that he had no reason to fear the collapse or the end of socialism, and they had agreed on a meeting of prime ministers on January 9. Gorbachev made a strange remark to the departing Ceausescu. “You shall be alive on the ninth of January,” he said.[175] By that date Ceausescu was dead.
Grachev voices a more realistic fear that the Yeltsin people will start a process to make Gorbachev the fall guy for the past, as the Germans have done to Erich Honecker. This is something that has been exercising the mind of Anatoly Chernyaev all week. Perhaps nothing will happen, he had written in his diary as the end neared. They are Russians, not Germans, after all, and already people are feeling sorry for Gorbachev. But this is not France either. Unlike de Gaulle, Gorbachev will never be allowed to return. So far everything has been done by civilized standards, but they have no guarantee that sometime in the future Yeltsin might not try to discredit them all to justify his destruction of the Union. Grachev asks Gorbachev whether he is concerned that somebody would try to get revenge on him by ferreting around in his past.
“I’m not worried,” replies Gorbachev, though he is aware that there have been attempts before to pin something on him for his lifestyle as first party secretary in Stavropol from 1970 to 1978. Eduard Shevardnadze told him once that in 1984, in the jostling for power in the Politburo before Chernenko died, officials at the interior ministry were instructed by a rival of Gorbachev to dig up compromising material on his Stavropol days.[176]
Gorbachev himself received a jolt two years ago when Andrey Sakharov took him aside to warn him of a plot to besmirch his name. Huddled together on chairs in a corner of the dimly lit stage in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses following a session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the former dissident confided to Gorbachev that he had evidence the
Now that the issue has been raised again by Grachev, Gorbachev insists there is nothing for him to worry about. “My conscience is clear. Do you really think there could have been any very extraordinary privileges available in Stavropol? There were no special apartments, not even a special store. We bought our food at the canteen of the district party committee. Until recently Raisa Maximovna was keeping all our receipts.”
“And what about Krasnodar?” asks Grachev. “Krasnodar is right next door to you, and some incredible things went on there at Medunov’s.” There had been a notorious case of corruption in the Krasnodar region next to Stavropol involving the first secretary, Sergey Medunov, a favorite of Brezhnev’s. “Medunov, he’s something else again,” exclaims Gorbachev. “I read complaints against him myself, especially from the local Jewish population, bribes, extortion, and what orgies in the official dachas! He wasn’t afraid of anything. And for good reason. He had direct access to Brezhnev.”
As general secretary of the Communist Party from 1964 to 1982, Leonid Brezhnev was notorious for his love of expensive gifts and for his failure to investigate allegations of corruption against his most generous donors. After Brezhnev died in 1982, Gorbachev, by then a member of the Politburo, was instrumental in getting Medunov fired, along with corrupt USSR interior minister Nikolay Shchelokov. Gorbachev recalls for his companions that Shchelokov had given the orders to destroy him in retaliation. But it was the interior minister who was destroyed. Shortly after losing his post, Shchelokov was found dead, apparently of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
The Gorbachevs were, however, not above sending presents to Brezhnev themselves, according to Brezhnev’s daughter Galina. Two years earlier she told the Moscow television program
