Down with Big Brother (55 page)

Minutes after his triumph Russia’s new leader walked out of the Kremlin to thank the
narod
. They had been waiting patiently for hours, standing beneath St. Basil’s Cathedral and listening to radio transmissions of the debate. When they caught sight of their hero’s silver gray pompadour, they rushed toward him with a roar, chanting, “Victory, victory.”

“My struggle is the people’s struggle,” Yeltsin boomed, addressing his supporters from a grassy mound beneath the red-ocher Kremlin wall. “This
is an important step in the victory of democracy. Now we need to continue the fight for the independence and sovereignty of Russia, for the revival of its national, economic, and spiritual image, so that Russia will live as it did before.”
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Acknowledging the cheers of the crowd with his fist, he crammed himself into the front seat of his Moskvich and was driven away.

In addition to a huge political constituency, Yeltsin now had a political stage vast enough to vie with that occupied by Mikhail Gorbachev. Russia was by far the largest, and most important, of the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics. Stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, Russia occupied 76 percent of the Soviet landmass, an area nearly twice the size of the entire United States. Its 142 million population equaled that of all the other republics combined. The republic accounted for 90 percent of Soviet oil production, 76 percent of natural gas output, and 89 percent of foreign trade earnings. It was no exaggeration to say that the Russian colossus held the key to Gorbachev’s success or failure.

Not only was Russia vast, but it was also ideally suited to the theme that Yeltsin had made his own, the yearning of ordinary people for a decent standard of living. Other nations had independence movements to distract them from their economic misery. Russia had nowhere else to go; it was the heart of the empire. The empire, however, had brought Russia nothing but headaches. The economic devastation left behind by seven decades of communism had caused many Russians to question the national tradition of constant territorial expansion, a tradition embraced by tsars and general secretaries alike. For the first time in many centuries Russians were ready to shed their traditional great power aspirations if this would lead to an improvement in their own living standards. It was a conscious turning inward, away from empire.

The buzzword in this debate was “sovereignty.” One of the first steps taken by the new Russian parliament under Yeltsin’s leadership was the adoption of a “declaration of sovereignty,” asserting the primacy of Russian laws over Soviet laws. The parliament also asserted a right of ownership and control over all natural resources on the territory of the Russian Republic. After a one-year transition period Russia would insist that the other Soviet republics begin paying world prices for oil, gas, and other raw materials.
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As Gorbachev was quick to appreciate, such a step threatened to destroy one of the last bonds holding the empire together. If Russia took control of its vast natural resources, his bargaining power would be much reduced not only with the Baltic states but also with Slavic republics such as Ukraine. The whole basis of Soviet power, and his personal authority as president of
the Soviet Union, would be undermined. The prediction that he had made at Foros the previous summer—“if Russia rises up … it will be the end of empire”—was in the process of coming true.

Yeltsin, by contrast, had discovered the perfect political weapon to use against his former Communist comrades. By leading the struggle for “sovereignty,” he would wrest power away from Gorbachev and the hated “center.” But the fight was sure to be fierce, and he needed allies. In order to make the necessary alliances, he was prepared to share his weapon with others. Not only republics but provinces, towns, and even villages had the right to be sovereign, he assured his supporters. “Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow,” he told provincial leaders shortly after his election. In Yeltsin’s conception, the entire structure of political power in Russia would be rebuilt from the bottom up, on a contractual basis. The possibility that the sovereignty weapon might one day be used against him appears to have never occurred to Yeltsin. If it did, he put it out of his mind. That was tomorrow, and this was today.

After almost three years in the political wilderness, he was back at the center of power, and it felt exhilarating. The new speaker took possession of an enormous office in the White House, a massive building on the Moskva River, where the Russian government had its headquarters. He visited the White House in the company of Sukhanov, who had helped him recover from despair at the Soviet Building Ministry, Gosstroi. The sight of the luxurious office, with its soft modern sheen, gave Sukhanov a “pleasant tingle,” he later recalled.

“Look, Boris Nikolayevich, what an office we have seized!” Sukhanov exclaimed.

“We haven’t just seized an office,” Yeltsin replied. “We have seized the whole of Russia.”
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MOSCOW
December 20, 1990

A
S IT TURNED OUT
, Yeltsin was wrong. He and the “democrats” had not “seized” the whole of Russia. Not yet, anyway. What they had “seized” was a luxurious office in the center of Moscow, as Sukhanov had been astute enough to observe. For the time being, their power did not extend very far beyond the Moscow Ring Road. Mother Russia—vast, lethargic, bankrupt, disillusioned—continued to elude them.

The popularly elected Russian Congress of People’s Deputies had proclaimed its authority over the whole of Russia. It passed resolutions, issued edicts, and adopted laws. The blizzard of paper, however, had little visible impact on real life. The “power ministries”—the military, the KGB, the police—remained under tight Communist Party control. Months after giving up its constitutionally guaranteed monopoly of power, the party continued to exercise its influence through a ubiquitous old-comrade network. The titles on office doors were changed to emphasize the shift of power from the party to elected bodies, but the occupants of the offices usually remained the same.

The bureaucrats used the centralized distribution system to remind Yeltsin who was boss. When the new speaker demanded an official residence outside Moscow, he was allocated a room in a seedy vacation home for low-level
clerks. After much complaining, he was eventually permitted to move in with a deputy minister of agriculture. The Ninth Directorate of the KGB, which was responsible for ensuring the safety of Soviet leaders, did its best to prevent Russia’s new rulers from gaining access to government cars and government communications systems. Weapons were a particularly sensitive issue. Fearing a crackdown by the hard-liners, Yeltsin attempted to build up a Russian security service that would be independent of the KGB. Since the Russian government did not control any munitions factories of its own, it had to scavenge whatever weapons it could. By the time a coup eventually did take place, in August 1991, the White House arsenal consisted of sixty assault rifles, a hundred pistols, two bulletproof jackets, and five walkie-talkies.
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Just because the Communist Party apparatus was successful in denying real power to Yeltsin did not mean that nothing had changed. The impotence and incompetence of the nomenklatura became increasingly apparent, as Russia sank further into an economic morass. The bureaucrats controlled everything, but there was little they could do with their power, other than hang on to it. The system of centralized distribution had ceased to function effectively, but the apparatchiks were loath to get rid of it, for fear of undermining their own authority. The result was political paralysis. Rival legislatures competed with one another to churn out laws and edicts that nobody respected. Unable to halt the disintegration of the economy, provincial governments attempted to protect their own citizens by resorting to total rationing and erecting customs barriers. The mood was everyone for himself.

There was a brief surge of optimism in early September, when Gorbachev and Yeltsin both embraced a plan to introduce a Western-style mixed economy over a period of five hundred days. The five-hundred-day plan, as it was known, envisaged the denationalization of 80 percent of the Soviet economy, the abolition of central planning, and the liberalization of foreign trade activity. Prices would be freed; the ruble would be made convertible; collective farms would be disbanded; private property would be recognized. What is more, all this would happen relatively painlessly. What Soviet economists called the monetary overhang—the phenomenon of too much money chasing too few goods—would be eliminated by the proceeds of a bankruptcy sale of state assets.

The five-hundred-day plan turned out to be another Utopian dream. There was no such thing as a painless transition from central planning to a free market. The economists who drew up the plan underestimated the opposition
they would encounter from the people who actually ran the economy: factory directors; collective farm chairmen; representatives of the military-industrial complex. These people coalesced into a powerful lobbying group. Scarcely a week went by without the convening of a conference to denounce the “ruinous” plans of the radicals and demand a return to well-tried “administrative methods.” The political pressure on Gorbachev became intense. Prime Minister Ryzkhov warned of political and economic disintegration. The kolkhoz chairmen threatened to withhold food from the cities if the five-hundred-day plan was implemented. Military deputies in the Soviet parliament went so far as to call for the president’s removal from office, unless he acted decisively to prevent “the collapse of the country.”
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In the end Gorbachev simply “got frightened,” in the words of his leading economics adviser.
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His own popularity had dropped to an all-time low of 21 percent. In the Soviet parliament the “democrats” were an insignificant force. The five-hundred-day plan contained many interesting ideas, but they existed only on paper. The harsh Russian winter was approaching. Gorbachev could not afford to antagonize the factory managers and bureaucrats, who were actually running the country, or the generals and secret police chiefs, who constituted his final line of defense against Yeltsin. It was here that real power lay. He decided to bow to political reality and beat a tactical retreat.

During the fall of 1990 the radicals watched in dismay as Gorbachev appeared to move steadily to the right. In early December he dismissed his progressive interior minister, Vadim Bakatin, who had incurred the wrath of the conservatives by failing to crack down on Baltic separatism. A few days later he issued a decree ordering all state enterprises to abide by the instructions of the central planners. In a speech to the Soviet parliament he called for “resolute measures” to keep the country together. But the biggest shock was yet to come.

E
DUARD
S
HEVARDNADZE WAS
particularly alarmed by the growing influence of the conservatives. The foreign minister considered himself a political soul mate of Gorbachev and one of the intellectual fathers of perestroika and “new thinking.” He recalled his talk with Gorbachev on the beach at Pitsunda in the early eighties. In his emotional Georgian way Shevardnadze had blurted out that everything was “rotten” in the Soviet Union, and it was impossible “to go on living like this.” In a sense, everything had begun with that conversation.

It was difficult for Shevardnadze to keep track of his old friend’s constant zigzags, but one thing seemed clear: Gorbachev was drifting away from him. The president had chosen to surround himself with representatives of the traditional power structures—the Communist Party, the military, the KGB. As the conservative attacks mounted, the foreign minister thought he was being made to shoulder the blame for the Kremlin’s international setbacks, while the president basked in the praise. One incident in particular rankled with him. On October 15, the day Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a rancorous “Who lost Germany?” debate erupted in the Soviet parliament. Shevardnadze later complained that he had been left to fend off the attacks of the reactionaries for permitting a reunited Germany to become a member of NATO. “The only thing I needed, wanted, and expected from the President was that he take a clear position: that he rebuff the right-wingers, and openly defend our common policy. I waited in vain.”
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After a sleepless night Shevardnadze made his decision. He wrote out his resignation statement, by hand, in the early-morning hours of December 20, 1990. He informed his daughter in Tbilisi and his two closest aides at the Foreign Ministry. They expressed their support for the action he was about to take. Then he left for the Kremlin.
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A stunned silence fell on the Congress of People’s Deputies as Shevardnadze embarked on what he described as “the shortest and most difficult speech of my life.” Thumping the air with his right fist, his Georgian accent thicker than ever, he berated the “comrade democrats” for scattering “into the bushes” while the fate of perestroika was being decided. Then came the disjointed words that made headlines around the world: “Dictatorship is coming; I state this with complete responsibility. No one knows what kind of dictatorship this will be and who will come—what kind of dictator—and what the regime will be like. I want to make the following statement: I am resigning.… I cannot reconcile myself to the events taking place in our country, and to the trials awaiting our people. I nevertheless believe that the dictatorship will not succeed, that the future belongs to democracy and freedom.”
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