Down with Big Brother (75 page)

When the soft-spoken Shushkevich confessed that not only had the agreement been signed but that Bush had already been informed, Gorbachev exploded. “This is a disgrace. You’ve been speaking with the president of the United States, and you failed to speak with the president of your
own
country? This is shameful.”
²⁸

MOSCOW
December 25, 1991

W
HEN
Y
ELTSIN RETURNED
to Moscow, he hesitated about going to the Kremlin to inform the Soviet president officially that he had lost both his job and his country. There were rumors that the Alpha Group had been placed on alert and was preparing to arrest “the Byelovezhsky troika” for the attempted overthrow of the state. Speaking by phone to Gorbachev, Yeltsin suggested that he might be taken prisoner if he ventured into the massive red-brick fortress.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Gorbachev incredulously, still employing the familiar
ty
form of address used for subordinates. “Have you gone out of your mind?”
²⁹

Yeltsin need not have worried. Gorbachev was furious at the leaders of the three Slavic republics, but he had no intention of using force to remain in power. The failure to conclude a new Union Treaty represented the collapse of everything he had been trying to achieve for the last nine months. He regarded the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a political and economic disaster that could only lead to more pain and turmoil. In the end, however, it was up to ordinary Soviet citizens to accept or reject the Byelovezhsky agreements.

“I will respect the choice made by the representative organs of the people,” he told an interviewer. “Let the people themselves decide.”
³⁰

Gorbachev had begun perestroika by attempting to involve ordinary people in decisions previously made by a closed circle of Kremlin leaders. After unleashing the unpredictable force of public opinion, he had gradually lost control over his own revolution. It had taken him places he had never intended to go, and now it threatened to devour him completely. But the successor to Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev remained true to the political choice that he had made when he launched perestroika. Unlike his predecessors, he would not resort to force to impose his will.

Over the next two weeks Gorbachev did everything he could to mobilize public opinion against the dissolution of the once-mighty Soviet superpower. He issued appeals, made statements, gave interviews. He tried to persuade the parliaments of individual Soviet republics to reject the decisions that had been taken in their name. He met with military leaders, newspaper editors, Nobel laureates. None of this activity had the slightest effect. Exhausted by the endless political debates and their own rapidly deteriorating living standards, the
narod
had lost interest in what the tsar had to say.

T
HERE WAS STILL SOME UNFINISHED BUSINESS
to take care of before Gorbachev could lay down his burden. On December 23 he finally had a nine-hour meeting in the Kremlin with Yeltsin, his political nemesis. The two leaders discussed the transfer of the nuclear
chemodanchik
and a suitable presidential pension. (It was decided that Gorbachev would receive the ruble equivalent of forty dollars a month, plus a limousine and half a dozen bodyguards.) Gorbachev then summoned his aide Yakovlev to witness the formal handing over of the Kremlin secrets to Yeltsin.

Together, the three men ripped open the buff manila envelopes containing the evidence of Stalin’s most terrible crimes. They examined the map of Europe drawn up by Molotov and Ribbentrop in August 1939, carving up Poland and the Baltic states between the Nazis and the Communists. They pored over Stalin’s instructions to the NKVD to exterminate the cream of the Polish officer corps, interned at Katyn. Yakovlev, in particular, was shocked by the contents of the presidential archive, the
osobaya papka
. As the head of an official commission investigating the Stalinist era he had been looking for these documents for years, but Gorbachev had always assured him that they could not be found.

“How can this be?” he asked Gorbachev.
³¹

The president claimed that he had only just found out about the damning documents from the archivists, who had gone through the
osobaya papka
prior to the transfer of power to Yeltsin. Yakovlev looked at his old
friend in amazement and disbelief. Yeltsin squirreled the incident away in his unforgiving memory. It would come in handy later, when he needed ammunition to use against the father of glasnost.

Gorbachev knew that he could expect little sympathy from Yeltsin. But he was taken aback by the abrupt change in the attitude of once-fawning bureaucrats and security personnel. As it became clear that he was on the way out, they seemed to go out of their way to slight him. Russian security guards instructed Raisa to clear the family’s personal effects out of the presidential dacha. By the end of his rule Gorbachev’s writ did not even extend to the sixty-nine acres of the Kremlin. It was all part of the time-honored Russian tradition of kicking a fallen leader.

Shortly after 5:00 p.m. on December 25 Gorbachev put through a call to President Bush, who was spending Christmas at Camp David. He struck a statesmanlike tone for his final telephone conversation with the leader of the rival superpower. He assured the president that there was no need to worry about the security of the Soviet nuclear arsenals and asked him to do what he could to support the new Confederation of Independent States, particularly Russia. Bush told Gorbachev that what they had achieved together “will go down in history.”
³²

Gorbachev spent his last hour in power in his office on the third floor of the Kremlin, next door to the Politburo conference hall. His aides guessed that the president did not want to be left alone with the nuclear button and his resignation statement. So they kept him company, reminiscing about his years as a regional Communist Party boss in Stavropol. A few minutes before 7:00 p.m. he walked into an anteroom where a television studio had been set up. There were close to a dozen people in the room, including executives from Soviet television and CNN, which was broadcasting the speech to 153 countries around the world.

There was a brief discussion between his aides over whether he should sign the decree giving up his duties as commander in chief before or after the resignation statement. Gorbachev interrupted the argument to ask his press secretary for a pen. He tried it out on a blank sheet of paper. “I need something softer,” he complained. A CNN representative took out his pen and handed it to Gorbachev, who signed the piece of paper on the spot.

At precisely 7:00 p.m., he began to address the 280 million citizens of the Soviet Union. Reading from a prepared text in a pale green binder, he tried to explain to the
narod
one last time why he had launched perestroika in the first place. He told them the Soviet Union had been lagging behind Western countries despite the abundance of land, oil, and natural resources. He said
he was proud of his role in ending the Cold War and helping Soviet citizens regain their freedom. Toward the end of his ten-minute speech he put particular emphasis on a few sentences he had written himself and inserted into the text at the last moment:
³³
“It is vitally important to preserve the democratic achievements of the last few years. They have been paid for through the suffering of our entire history, our tragic experience. They must not be given up, under any circumstances or under any pretext. Otherwise all our hopes for a better future will be dashed.”

Less than half an hour after Gorbachev finished speaking, at 7:35 p.m., the red Soviet flag was hauled down from the Kremlin for the last time. Moments later the white, red, and blue tricolor of Yeltsin’s Russia rose in its place. There was some scattered applause, and a few whistles, from the handful of tourists gathered in Red Square. A light snow was falling.

Seventy-four years after the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.

O
F ALL THE OUTSTANDING LEADERS
of the twentieth century—Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill—the last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party was surely the most contradictory. His name will be associated with epoch-making developments that were the very opposite of his original intention. He was the Communist who dismantled communism, the reformer who was overtaken by his own reforms, the emperor who allowed the world’s last great multinational empire to break apart. He wanted to lead the Soviet Union into the information age but was destined to preside over its downfall. He launched a revolution and ended up becoming one of its victims.

Gorbachev’s most important contribution lay not so much in what he
did
, as in what he
permitted
to happen, almost in spite of himself. If Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator, Gorbachev was the Great Facilitator. In contrast with the early Bolsheviks, who set out to create utopia by force, Gorbachev permitted history to resume its natural course. He sought not to change the course of history but to swim in its tide. Even after it had become clear where his revolution was leading, he did not draw back from the consequences of his own actions.

Gorbachev’s mistakes, like his political vision, were mistakes on the grand scale. He clung to the illusion that the Communist Party was capable of reforming itself long after it had been hopelessly discredited. An enthusiastic proponent of elections for other people, he never submitted his own
record to the judgment of the voters. A decisive moment occurred in 1989, when he rejected the idea of a direct election and allowed himself to be nominated for a bloc of uncontested seats in the new Soviet parliament. Up until that point he could probably have won a popular mandate—the economy had not yet started to unravel, and his prestige was still high—but he chose to show solidarity with his Politburo colleagues. His loyalty to the party cost him dearly during the final showdown with Yeltsin, when he found himself without a reliable political weapon. He renounced the use of the machine gun but failed to secure the legitimacy of the ballot box. He was never able to answer satisfactorily Andrei Sakharov’s question at the first Congress of People’s Deputies: “Whose side are you on, Mikhail Sergeyevich?”

The other major failure was his handling of the economy. Gorbachev did more to hasten the end of the “evil empire” through his muddled economic policies than anything Reagan could possibly have devised. The deficit in the state budget had risen from just over 3 percent when Gorbachev came to power to a staggering 30 to 50 percent by the time he stepped down. Things started going wrong almost from the moment he arrived in office. The disastrous antialcohol campaign of 1986–87 eliminated the single most effective source of government revenue. In order to plug the deficit, government presses worked overtime, churning out increasingly worthless paper rubles. Gorbachev compounded his mistake by refusing to liberalize prices, a course of action that led to chronic shortages of both consumer goods and industrial components. This was the beginning of one of the most catastrophic economic slides ever experienced by an industrialized society.

These were monumental errors, but they served a historical purpose. The transition from communism to capitalism was never going to be smooth. The totalitarian order established by Lenin and Stalin was so formidable and so deeply rooted in the Soviet psyche that it could not be demolished head-on. To remain in power and continue his reforms, Gorbachev had to proceed by stealth. This master of Kremlin intrigue bobbed and weaved among the rival factions, hiding his true intentions beneath a fog of Communist rhetoric. Duplicity and obfuscation were his required talents; political survival was the supreme imperative. Had he been clearer about his goals, it is likely that his Politburo colleagues would have attempted to get rid of him much earlier. By the time they finally understood what was happening, it was too late. The party had been destroyed from within.

The Soviet Communist Party was prepared to fight to remain in power as long as this was a serious option. The repressive power of the totalitarian
state meant that domestic rebellions could be ruthlessly crushed. From the moment such a state possessed nuclear weapons, it became invulnerable to foreign invasion. The only way out, therefore, was death by economic exhaustion.

The irony is that the last general secretary had to fail in order to succeed in the larger historical mission of vanquishing communism. Gorbachev came to power promising to reverse several decades of Soviet economic decline and revitalize the Marxist-Leninist idea. Had he succeeded, the system would have received a new or at least a temporary lease on life. There would have been less pressure for significant political reform. The deepening economic crisis made the transition to democracy possible but also fraught with danger because it left many people yearning for the security of the authoritarian past.

In the long run the collapse of Soviet communism was inevitable, for the simple reason that it was too top-heavy a structure to bear its own weight. But there was nothing inevitable about the timing of the collapse or the manner in which it occurred. History will record that it was Gorbachev who set in motion the chain of events that led to the disintegration of the world’s first socialist state. Through a strange amalgam of genius and incompetence, idealism and egotism, naiveté and cunning, the onetime peasant boy from Privolnoye dealt a fatal blow to the most durable dictatorship humankind has ever known.