otherwise I’ll cancel the meeting,” snorted Yeltsin. Grachev signaled to the television people to leave. There was no doubting whose wishes must be obeyed, even in the precincts of Gorbachev’s own office.
Koppel remembered the Russian leader glowering as he walked towards the office. He felt that Yeltsin was angry at him. “I was paying all this attention to Gorbachev. He felt I should be seeking him out. He was the new boy in town. This was his moment; he was absorbing all the power. It was bleeding through Gorbachev’s hands minute by minute.”
In an interview not long before, Yeltsin had bluntly told Koppel his opinion of Gorbachev: “To a large extent, I don’t like him.”
Yeltsin waited until the reporters left before he would even cross the threshold into Gorbachev’s sanctum.
Zhenya, the Kremlin waiter, brought in a tray with coffee, cups, shot glasses, and two bottles, vodka for Yeltsin and Jubilee cognac for Gorbachev, “to go with the coffee,” as Chernyaev observed dryly. After some small talk they took their jackets off and in shirt sleeves and ties moved to the adjacent Walnut Room. It was in this same room on March 11, 1985, the day after the death of Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko, that the Politburo of the Communist Party agreed to make Mikhail Gorbachev general secretary of the party and undisputed leader of the Soviet Union.
Sitting beneath alabaster chandeliers at the end of the long teakwood table with fifteen chairs, the two antagonists discussed the implications of the agreement reached at Alma-Ata. Gorbachev was angry and heavy- hearted but resigned. As Grachev put it, “There was no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube.”
Gorbachev conceded to Yeltsin that for the sake of peace and order he would publicly accept the CIS as the constitutional successor to the Soviet Union. Yeltsin listened attentively to his warnings about the dangers of Balkanization. He in turn asked Gorbachev to lend him his support for the next six months, or at least not criticize him, while he imposed shock therapy on Russia.
It was inevitably going to be a tense encounter. Gorbachev’s aide Georgy Shakhnazarov noted that it was not in Gorbachev’s character to be humble nor in Yeltsin’s to be magnanimous. The two agreed to invite Alexander Yakovlev to “referee” the meeting.
The sixty-eight-year-old father of glasnost came limping into the room. He was intrigued to be there. It meant that he would be a witness “not only to the beginning but also to the end of the lofty career of Mikhail Gorbachev.” Like his mentor, the former ambassador to Canada and cheerleader for perestroika did not want to see the Soviet Union broken up, and he was opposed to what Yeltsin had done. Nevertheless, the Russian president respected him for his courageous role during the coup and for his campaign to expose the crimes of Stalin. In October Yeltsin had appointed Yakovlev to chair a commission for the rehabilitation of victims of political repression.
The two presidents agreed on a transition timetable. Gorbachev would abdicate two days later, on December 25. He would broadcast his resignation speech to the nation at seven o’clock in the evening of that day. After finishing his address, he would sign the decrees resigning as president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and giving up his position as commander in chief of the Soviet armed forces. Immediately after that, Yeltsin would come to his office with Defense Minister Shaposhnikov and take possession of the nuclear suitcase. Gorbachev and his staff could continue using their Kremlin offices for a further four days after Gorbachev’s resignation, until December 29, to conduct unfinished business and clear out their desks, after which Yeltsin would move in with his staff as president of Russia. The red flag would come down from the Kremlin on December 31.[240] Shakhnazarov, who was called into the meeting briefly, would tell Gorbachev’s assembled staff of aides, officials, interpreters, receptionists, typists, and researchers the next day that they had to leave the Kremlin on December 29, and that the presidential apparatus would stop functioning on January 2.[241]
In return for all this, Gorbachev would step down gracefully, not challenge Yeltsin’s right to succeed him, and stay out of the political fray to give the Russian president a clear run to implement his economic reforms.
Once the basics were settled, the heads of Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s secretariats, Grigory Revenko and Yury Petrov, were brought in to take notes on the nitty-gritty of Gorbachev’s future welfare.
“Gorbachev submitted a list of claims—his compensation package—that ran to several pages,” claimed Yeltsin later. “Almost all the items were purely material demands. He wanted a pension equaling a presidential salary, indexed to inflation; a presidential apartment and dacha; a car for himself and his wife. But more than anything he wanted a foundation, a big building in the center of Moscow, the former Academy of Social Sciences, and with it car service, office equipment, and security guards. Psychologically his reasoning was very simple: If you want to get rid of me so badly, then be so good as to dig deep into your pockets.”
Yeltsin agreed that the Gorbachevs could see out their retirement in a smaller state dacha and apartment, with two official cars and twenty staff, including security, drivers, cooks, and service personnel. He declined to authorize a separate ex-president’s office and staff, and he cut back the amount of pension requested and the number of bodyguards. He signed a decree giving Gorbachev a pension equivalent to his salary of 4,000 rubles a month—ten times the average Soviet wage but a mere $40 at the official rate of exchange. The arrangement would not leave Gorbachev in penury. He was already wealthy from advance royalties for his memoirs.
Next they settled on provisions for Gorbachev’s inner circle. They agreed to set up a bilateral commission headed by Revenko and Petrov to find jobs for Gorbachev’s displaced staff. The Soviet president asked Yeltsin to allow his associates Ivan Silayev and Shakhnazarov to buy their state dachas at reasonable prices. Silayev was the last prime minister of the Soviet Union, an office that had been defunct since the coup, and Shakhnazarov had been by Gorbachev’s side throughout the last turbulent years. The Russian president agreed. Turning to Yakovlev, he offered him the same deal. Yakovlev declined. He regretted his decision in years to come, as property prices in Moscow soared.
The terms Yeltsin agreed to with Gorbachev were on a par with legislation passed by the USSR Supreme Soviet over a year earlier. This provided for a pension and state-owned dacha with the necessary staff, bodyguard, and transport for the president on leaving office. They were also remarkably similar to those granted in 1964 to Nikita Khrushchev, the only other Soviet leader to be ousted from power. Khrushchev, another would-be reformer, was sacked by the Politburo for alleged policy failures and erratic behavior. He was given a pension and was allowed to remain in his general secretary’s mansion and his city apartment for a year after his departure, before moving to a smaller state mansion. But Khrushchev was made a nonperson. He simply disappeared from public view. His name did not appear again in Moscow newspapers until he died seven years later. This distressed him deeply. He spent days weeping bitterly. Asked once what Khrushchev did in retirement, his grandson replied, “He cries.” Gorbachev would not become a nonperson, but he too would shed a tear before the day was out.
The two adversaries, Yakovlev recalled, managed up to this point to conduct a very business-like and mutually respectful meeting. “They argued sometimes but without any rancor. I was very sorry they did not start cooperating at that level of mutual understanding before.” He thought whisperers on both sides had helped poison the atmosphere between them.
At one o’clock Zhenya delivered lunch to the three men. They helped themselves to salads and salami, potato and cabbage pies, and bottles of fizzy mineral water. When the waiter emerged with his empty cart, aides to both presidents quizzed him about how they were getting on. He told them the meeting seemed to have got off to a civilized start.
With the material terms of the transition agreed, Revenko and Petrov left. Only Yakovlev would witness what transpired next.
Gorbachev produced for Yeltsin a certificate giving him control over the Archives of the General Secretary. This was a collection of between 1,000 and 2,000 files that contained secret documents passed on by Soviet leaders from the time of the founding of the state by Lenin. They were known to senior Soviet officials as the Stalinskiye Arkhivy, the Stalin Archives.
Though many of the crimes of past communist leaders had been acknowledged for the first time under Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, the top secret documents still held proof of criminal actions at the highest levels of Soviet power, most of which had never been admitted publicly. They implicated recent Soviet leaders in the cover- up and denials of the Stalin terror, and many other bloody episodes that would sustain charges that, in the past, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a vast criminal conspiracy and was implicated in international terrorism.
Every general secretary received the archives on taking office. They all knew, or could find out, what secrets
