at their city apartment on Moscow’s Lenin Hills, which also belongs to the state.
When Gorbachev moved his family here, they expected it would be for life. The dacha, called officially Barvikha-4, was the ultimate symbol of success for the top Soviet bureaucrat. They have occupied smaller government dachas during Gorbachev’s ascent to the pinnacle of Soviet power. As state-owned residences they were quite impersonal, and Raisa disliked that they were “always on the move, always lodgers.” But this was to be their final stop. This dacha was different. It was their creation. The yellow three-story complex was modeled in Second Empire style under Gorbachev’s personal supervision after he became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985. In those days the party leader had emperor-like powers of command, and it was built in six months by a special corps of the Soviet army, earning the generals a few Medals of Labor. This had been Raisa’s first real home. “My home is not simply my castle,” she once said. “It is my world, my galaxy.”
Known by the security people as the
For more than half a century Soviet leaders have occupied elegant homes along the western reaches of the river. This area has been the favored retreat of the Moscow elite since the seventeenth century, when Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich expressly forbade the construction of any production facilities. Stalin lived in a two-story mansion on a high bank in Kuntsevo, closer to the city. Known as Blizhnyaya Dacha (“nearby dacha”), it was hidden in a twelve- acre wood with a double-perimeter fence and at one time was protected by eight camouflaged 30-millimeter antiaircraft guns and a special unit of three hundred interior ministry troops. At Gorbachev’s dacha there is a military command post, facilities for the nuclear button and its operators, and a special garage containing an escape vehicle with a base as strong as a military tank.
Every previous Soviet leader but one left their dachas surrounded by wreaths of flowers. Stalin passed away in his country house while continuing to exercise his powers, and those who followed him—Leonid Brezhnev, Yury Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko—all expired while still in charge of the communist superpower. Only Stalin’s immediate successor, Nikita Khrushchev, a reformer like Gorbachev, had his political career brought to a sudden end when he was ousted from power in 1964 for, as
Today Gorbachev will suffer the same fate as Khrushchev. He will depart from the dacha as president of the Soviet Union. When he returns in the evening, he will be Gospodin (“Mister”) Gorbachev, a pensioner, age sixty—ten years younger than Khrushchev was when he was kicked out.
At around 9:30 a.m. Gorbachev takes his leave of Zakharka, as he fondly calls Raisa (he once saw a painting by the nineteenth-century artist Venetsianov of a woman of that name who bore a resemblance to Raisa). He goes down the wooden stairs, past the pictures hanging on the staircase walls, among them a multicolored owl drawn in childish hand, sent to Raisa as a memento by a young admirer. At the bottom of the stairs was, until recently, a little dollhouse with a toboggan next to it, a reminder of plans for New Year’s festivities with the grandchildren, eleven-year-old Kseniya and four-year-old Nastya; the family will now have to celebrate elsewhere. He spends a minute at the cloakroom on the right of the large hallway to change his slippers for outdoor shoes, then dons a fine rust-colored scarf, grey overcoat, and fur hat, and leaves through the double glass doors, carrying his resignation speech in a thin, soft leather document case.
Outside in the bright morning light his driver holds open the front passenger door of his official stretch limousine, a Zil-41047, one of a fleet built for party and state use only. Gorbachev climbs into the leather seat beside him. He always sits in the front.
Two colonels in plainclothes emerge from their temporary ground-floor lodgings with the little suitcase that accompanies the president everywhere. They climb into a black Volga sedan to follow the Zil into Moscow. It will be their last ride with this particular custodian of the
With a swish of tires, the bullet-proof limousine—in reality an armored vehicle finished off as a luxury sedan —moves around the curving drive and out through a gate in the high, green wooden fence, where a policeman gives a salute, and onto Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway. The heavy automobile proceeds for the first five miles under an arch of overhanging snow-clad fir trees with police cars in front and behind flashing their blue lights. It ponderously negotiates the frequent bends that were installed to prevent potential assassins from taking aim at Soviet officials on their way to and from the Kremlin. Recently some of the state mansions have been sold to foreigners by cash- strapped government departments, and many of the once-ubiquitous police posts have disappeared.
The convoy speeds up as it comes to Kutuzovsky Prospekt. It races for five miles along the center lane reserved for official cavalcades, zooms past enormous, solid Stalin-era apartment blocks, and hurtles underneath Moscow’s Triumphal Arch and across the Moscow River into the heart of the Russian capital. The elongated black car hardly slackens speed as it cruises along New Arbat, its pensive occupant unseen behind the darkened windows.
The seventh and last Soviet leader plans to explain on television this evening that he dismantled the totalitarian regime and brought them freedom, glasnost, political pluralism, democracy, and an end to the Cold War. For doing so, he is praised and admired throughout the world.
But here in Russia he is the subject of harsh criticism for his failure to improve the lot of the citizens. Few of the bleary-eyed shoppers slipping and sliding on the dirty, compacted snow outside food stores will shed tears at his departure from office. They judge him through the prism of empty shop windows.
Gorbachev knows that. He has even repeated to foreign dignitaries a popular anecdote against himself, about a man in a long line for vodka who leaves in frustration, telling everyone he is going to the Kremlin to shoot Gorbachev, only to return later complaining, “There’s a longer line there.”
Self-criticism, however, is not a prominent part of his psychological repertoire. Gorbachev has in fact made many mistakes, but he will concede this only grudgingly, as he looks back in his resignation speech on his service to the people.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin almost always starts his day around two o’clock in the morning.[15] The president of the Russian Federation suffers from acute insomnia. He doesn’t like sleeping pills and finds they do not help him sleep anyway. He habitually gets out of bed a couple of hours after retiring in the late evening. Tall and awkward with small blue eyes set in a rough peasant face and a full head of silver hair, the sixty-year-old former construction engineer paces around the room on these occasions in his thin Japanese hotel robe, nursing his headache and stomach pains and drinking a little tea, before returning to bed an hour later. It is worse if he is afflicted by one of his periodic attacks of gout, which cause excruciating pain in his big toe.
Looking back at this time in his life Yeltsin will later recall “enervating bouts of depression, agonizing reflections late at night, insomnia and headaches, despair at the grimy and impoverished look of Moscow and other cities… the criticisms in the media, the badgering in the Russian parliament, the weight of decisions.” He is constantly dissatisfied with his work, “and that is a frightful thing.” His mind is never at rest, and he becomes more open with himself in the small hours than in the office during daylight, “when all his buttons are buttoned.” He finds that at two in the morning “you recall all sorts of things and mull over matters that are not always so pleasant.”[16]
This December morning he has many matters to contemplate, some pleasant, some less so. Today he will emerge triumphant from his long and nasty feud with Mikhail Gorbachev. He acknowledges to himself that the motivations for many of his actions are embedded in his bitter conflict with the Soviet president. Just recently his assistant Valentina Lantseva pleaded with him to stop the love-hate relationship with the man in the Kremlin. He retorted, “Stop teaching me how to live!” Never again will he have to negotiate with Gorbachev, endure his windy lectures, put up with his criticisms, take lashings from his profane tongue. Gorbachev, the charming and sophisticated world statesman, can turn the air blue with his profanity. Yeltsin, the hard-drinking, backwoods Siberian, regarded as a buf foon in many international circles, never uses swear words and intensely dislikes those who do.
