Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (66 page)

The creaking and the pointless telephones were perfect metaphors for Gorbachev’s presidency after August 1991. The heads of almost all the former Soviet states were still engaged in talks with him, the aim of which was to produce a new-style Union, but at the same time Yeltsin was privately canvassing the influential players with a scheme to break the whole empire apart.
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In public, his speeches were about the things Russia could do alone. When he appeared on people’s screens, it was always to the backdrop of Russia’s tricolour. By contrast, Gorbachev’s protocol team was regularly faced with a last-minute choice between the Russian and the Soviet banners. Left to himself, the Soviet president would always opt for the latter, and his private plane, ‘The Soviet Union’, boasted a scarlet tail-fin to the last.
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But there would soon be no Soviet land to fly over. On 1 December 1991, the people of Ukraine, Russia’s most cherished close neighbour, voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence. It was the last blow to Gorbachev’s plan to reconceive the Soviet Union, and it allowed Yeltsin to trump him with a treaty that he had already negotiated, in semi-secret, at the Belovezhsky Nature Reserve in Belarus.
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This formed a patchwork of new, independent nations, who worked on their common problems together for a few more months before drifting apart. Gorbachev’s purpose, his role as Union President, was dead.

There was a lot of talking in the final weeks, but at the birth of this new version of Russia, there were real things, not just ideas, to hand over. In December 1991, Yeltsin took control of an extensive nuclear weapons system: the ‘button’ came in the shape of a ‘nuclear briefcase’, made by Samsonite, containing digital codes.
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As the clock ticked down to zero hour, however, Gorbachev also gave him several ziggurats of files. The Kremlin’s hidden trove of documents included details of the Chernobyl disaster, but history played the largest role, and the records testified to many acts that were officially denied. The presidential archive contained secrets about the Afghan war, about political repression under Khrushchev, and many papers bearing Stalin’s pencil marks, one of which proved to be the original draft of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. Such files, like well-primed nuclear bombs, had been passing from general secretary to general secretary for half a century. Central Committee staff had always denied their existence, and even Gorbachev had not released them in the
glasnost
years. ‘Take them,’ he told the latest heir. ‘They’re yours now.’
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Among the very few who witnessed the two leaders’ final meeting in the Kremlin’s Walnut Room was Andrei Grachev. That is, he and the other closest aides waited in a nearby lobby for ten hours. ‘Our only source of information’, according to Grachev, ‘was Zhenya, the Kremlin waiter, who was shuttling back and forth between the Walnut Room and the kitchen carrying bottles and plates.’
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‘Our conversation was protracted and difficult,’ Yeltsin later insisted, though Grachev’s source reported that ‘the mood seem[ed] to be good’.
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The press did not even have Zhenya’s bulletins, and state radio channels followed Soviet tradition by playing endless broadcasts of the ‘Dance of the Cygnets’ from
Swan Lake.
The next day, however, again in that sham television office, a solemn Gorbachev signed his last presidential statement, borrowing a pen from the man from CNN. His final address as president was dignified and he used a phrase that Russians would not often hear again. ‘I make this decision,’ he explained, ‘based on considerations of principle.’
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It was all over in minutes. The cameras followed Mikhail Gorbachev inside the Senate as he closed his office door.
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By the time the foreign journalists were ready to start filming on the streets outside, the Soviet flag had vanished from the Senate roof. The world was later treated to the spectacle of its removal by courtesy of Russian private enterprise. Though the professionals had missed it, a group of Muscovites had captured the lowering of the Kremlin’s last red flag with an imported camcorder. A copy of their VHS cassette cost less than fifty US dollars, cash.
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12

Normality

Boris Yeltsin moved into Gorbachev’s office as soon as the cleaners had emptied the bin. The brass plate on the former president’s door was taken down that very night (Yeltsin’s men would later claim that Gorbachev’s staff retaliated, on their way out, by unscrewing some of the other fittings and pocketing several gold fountain pens with the official crest).
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The red flag that had flown above the Senate roof for seven decades was gone, and many hoped that the remaining Soviet legacies would disappear as fast. Optimists had taken to describing the entire interlude of Communist rule as an aberration, an experiment; they argued that the time had come for Russia to revert to its true path. If there were doubts about what that might mean, in view of Moscow’s turbulent, eclectic history, they were ignored in the euphoria of victory. As the clock on the Kremlin’s Saviour Tower struck midnight at the turn of the New Year, 1992, the famous chimes were drowned out by the sound of fireworks. The champagne flowed and people sang; everyone believed they had a right, now, to what they had begun to call a normal life.
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What they got was hardship and uncertainty. The list of problems that the new republic faced would have challenged a far stronger and more deeply rooted regime. From environmental degradation and low productivity to the collapse of public infrastructures, the Soviet legacy was crippling enough on its own. But the new state’s headlong economic reforms added further stress, precipitating high rates of mortality and record levels of crime, hyper-inflation, and shortages of everything from food to anti-cancer drugs.
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The Russian Ministry of the Interior estimated that by 1993, 85 per cent of the new private banks had links to organized crime. So did almost half the country’s businesses, which was not surprising when even an honest trader could not survive without paying for protection (colloquially known as a ‘roof’) and following underworld rules.
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The official murder rate in Moscow increased eight-fold between 1989 and 1993; the true figure was probably blacker still.
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Unsurprisingly, almost no-one was prepared to gamble on the new republic’s future prosperity. The 1990s saw a massive haemorrhage of capital from Russia to safe havens such as London and New York. Since most of it was exported illegally, the figures are hard to establish, but estimates for the period 1990–95 vary between about 65 and 400 billion US dollars.
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In this unpromising environment the challenge Russia’s leaders faced was to build a credible, resilient and dignified state. The tsars had used religious iconography and stunning public splendour to achieve this; Lenin had invoked the sacred blood of martyrs and the proletarian revolution. From Ivan the Terrible and Mikhail Romanov to Stalin, no-one had expected any newly formed regime to flourish without a convincing pedigree and some form of mission. In the 1990s, however, the new state had few options on either score. In most societies – the ones that do not doubt their own normality – shared values tend to go unspoken and are almost always fluid anyway. But post-Communist Russia faced a moral crisis. Yeltsin was keen to make sure that it remained neither Soviet nor Communist, but Russia was not European and its people were not ready to accept the triumph of the west. That left a void, a kind of vertigo, especially in a society that had lived so long in the shadow of successive all-encompassing ideas.

The republic that Boris Yeltsin had inherited could still claim to be the largest country in the world, but it was no longer a superpower, no longer the seat of a dynastic monarchy, no longer exotic or even splendid. Even its once-mighty army did not look particularly fearsome any more. Throughout Russian history, shaky and parvenu regimes had invoked versions of the past to build legitimacy in circumstances such as these, but even that was awkward for the leaders of new Russia. The state could hardly celebrate the Soviet years, and yet its leaders had been raised as communists; many had built their careers by denouncing capitalist values and systems of privilege. In his days as provincial Sverdlovsk’s Party boss, Yeltsin himself had ordered the demolition of a house that had served as the final prison of Nicholas II and his family. At the time, as a communist, he had argued that the place should not become a shrine. As president, ironically, shrines were exactly what he was about to need.

If Yeltsin had consulted his old friends, the leaders of the other former republics of the old USSR, he would have heard how they made use of nationalist rhetoric, exploiting their historic sufferings to forge new nations, or at least to garner millions of votes. But Russian politicians could not take this argument too far, and not merely because theirs was the nation that had historically oppressed the rest. The other problem was that Moscow was still in charge of an empire. The population of Yeltsin’s new state, which was nearly 148 million in 1991, was overwhelmingly (more than 80 per cent) Russian by ethnicity, but apart from the core ‘Russian’ lands, it also included the whole of oil- and gas-rich Siberia as well as formerly tribal territories on the northern slopes of the Caucasus, such as Chechnya, North Ossetia and Kabardino-Balkaria.
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Adopting a specious label designed to incorporate these valuable minorities, Moscow dubbed its new country the ‘Russian Federation’, a name derived from Soviet times and intended to suggest an equal partnership between the peoples of its several regions. In reality, the Russian heartland, and the Russian nation, dominated the political landscape and continued to dictate the cultural tone. But something more was still needed: some dignity and charisma, some sense of purpose and collective pride.

The answer could have been provided by democracy itself; in many countries, after all, government gets its real splendour from the idea of consent. As the rotten Soviet empire fell apart in the autumn of 1991, there was no reason to accept that Russians were in some way doomed to perpetual tyranny, or that their future had been bound and chained by history. The chance had come to create a new state. Admittedly, the White House building in Moscow was far from regal; it looked more like an airport terminal than a palace. The parliament that sat in it, moreover, had been elected under Soviet rules, and it remained a creature of the corrupt Soviet world. But even that anachronism could have been remedied by a round of fresh elections. Unfortunately, however, Yeltsin’s own ambition had centred on the only real prize he knew, Kremlin-style power, and once he had his office in the fort he left outstanding details to his aides, a group with little appetite for tedious election-fights. The crucial summer ebbed away, and in October 1991, the hacks and demagogues filed back to their accustomed seats in the White House chamber.
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In what became a tragedy for Russia, the leaders of its parliament turned out to be less interested in hope and freedom than in crude power-struggles of their own. In the spring of 1993, a faction finally attempted to impeach Yeltsin, aiming to take the Kremlin for itself. The attempt failed, but its main instigators continued to develop and exploit any promising-looking seams of popular discontent. On 1 May, the Communist spring festival, large crowds of opposition supporters gathered in the streets and squares near the Kremlin to demand better pensions, jobs and basic social provision. The police were unprepared, and there were violent confrontations, burning cars.
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Similar demonstrations were to be a feature of the cityscape for five more months, sometimes accompanied by army songs, sometimes by portraits of Stalin.
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Forlorn red flags and bitter crowds became the symbol of a thwarted, sour democracy.

The disappointment turned to crisis on 21 September 1993, when Yeltsin finally dissolved the Supreme Soviet, Russia’s parliament.
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The moment should have brought any supporters of democracy out to the streets, but most stayed quietly at home. Some later claimed to have been busy simply trying to survive. With good cause, too, they were appalled by the obstructive and self-interested politics of the White House. ‘We were very tired of political meetings and U-turns, bickering and scandals,’ a journalist later admitted. ‘All we wanted was to get on with life.’
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In stark contrast to 1991, when opposition to the August coup had rallied thousands of supporters of reform, the crowds who gathered to defend this incarnation of the White House included old-style communists, pensioners, and xenophobic Russian chauvinists.
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Yeltsin surrounded the whole lot with tanks, and this time lethal shells were fired. Even Russia’s official count of the White House siege speaks of 147 dead, but the casualty figures in other versions are much higher.
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‘As I write, I can hear a familiar sort of sound through my windows, just like fireworks,’ wrote the liberal journalist Otto Latsis. ‘But it’s not fireworks. It’s the tank shells that are battering the White House. And this is not the Caucasus or the Pamirs; it’s the centre of Moscow.’
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Eight years later, when an attempt was made to call the president to account, critics confirmed that he had forbidden doctors to come to the assistance of the wounded White House defenders until his victory was sure. ‘When I make a strategic decision,’ Yeltsin later boasted, ‘I don’t punish myself with ridiculous worries over whether I might have done it differently or whether I could have found another way.’
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