Vodka Politics (60 page)

Instead, Russia suffered a grueling economic and social collapse that became the most drunken period in all of Russian history—no mean feat. While the causes of Russia’s post-independence catastrophes are many and complex, they were only exacerbated by democratic Russia’s first president. Dubbed “a revolutionary who preserved tradition,” he both repudiated and restored Russia’s autocratic traditions at the same time.
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While espousing freedom and democracy, Russia’s first elected president was a product of the Soviet autocratic system of vodka politics through and through. So before the very real devastation of Russia in the 1990s can be addressed, we must first confront the man whose very name has become an international synonym for drunken excess: President Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.

Stumbling Toward The Exits

By 1991 the Soviet Union was in its death throes. The massive hole in the budget, of which lost vodka revenues was a significant cause, was papered over with reams of new rubles, stoking inflation. With money losing its value as they held it in their hands, citizens scrambled to buy essentials and even food, most already gone from store shelves. Fistfights and skirmishes in the lengthening queues highlighted that the half-measures of
perestroika
weren’t wreaking just economic chaos, but social instability as well.

Meanwhile, the openness of
glasnost
and the self-liberation of the Eastern European satellite states emboldened nationalists in the Soviet Baltic Republics, Georgia, and even the Russian Republic itself. The fissures of nationalism threatened to shatter the Soviet Union as one republic after another pressed for autonomy, then independence. Hoping to peaceably accommodate pressures for self-determination, Gorbachev proposed a new treaty that would reorganize the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into the Union of Sovereign States—a confederation of independent countries that would maintain a common executive as well as a shared military and foreign policy.

This was a bitter pill for many Soviet patriots to swallow—especially for a group of high-level conspirators in Gorbachev’s own cabinet who decided that they could no longer sit idly by and watch the dismemberment of the only motherland they had ever known. On August 19, 1991—one day before the signing of the new union treaty—they acted. At dawn, citizens awoke to news that Gorbachev—then vacationing at the presidential retreat in Crimea—had suddenly fallen ill and was unable to perform his duties. Gorbachev’s vice president, Gennady Yanayev, assumed the role of acting president and head of the so-called State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP), which vowed to solve the crippling shortages and restore the “honor and dignity” of the Soviet people. Following the announcement, the media came under emergency control. All meetings and street demonstrations were strictly outlawed. Martial law was imposed, and tanks rolled through the streets of Moscow.

This was a coup d’etat. And like every coup in Russia’s imperial past, this too was drenched in vodka.

According to witnesses, on the afternoon of Sunday August 18, both Vice President Yanayev and Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov had been out drinking with friends when they were summoned to the Kremlin by KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, who set the plan in motion. “Yanayev wavered and reached out for the bottle,” Gorbachev wrote in his
Memoirs
. Along with the other conspirators, it is doubtful that Yanayev was sober at any time during the bungled three-day coup.
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Co-conspirator Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov later confirmed that not only was Yanayev “quite drunk,” but so too were other plotters: KGB head Kryuchkov, Interior Minister Boris Pugo, and even Marshal Yazov himself. According to Yazov’s trial testimony, Pavlov was incapacitated by headaches and unspecified illnesses from the very beginning. After chasing his blood pressure medications with alcohol, Pavlov had to be pulled unconscious from the bathroom. After that, “I saw him two or three times, and each time he was dead drunk,” Yazov testified. “I think he was doing this purposefully, to get out of the game.”
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Whether or not the failure can be chalked up to the liquor, the conspirators forgot rule number one of any takeover: neutralize your rivals. Their main opponent was Boris Yeltsin, who just the year before had been popularly elected president of the Russian Republic—the largest and most important of the fifteen republics that constituted the USSR. Yeltsin was a champion of liberalization, democratization, and devolution of power from the Kremlin to the republics. Yet while the plotters in the Kremlin dispatched KGB troops to his dacha, somehow they never ordered his arrest.

On Sunday, August 18, Yeltsin was in Almaty, concluding a weekend trip to shore up relations with the Kazakh republic and its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. After a long Saturday of forging friendship treaties, Sunday began with vodka. “Yeltsin was well and truly drunk,” Nazarbayev remembered, as the tipsy Russian president tried to ride the magnificent black stallion Nazarbayev had just given him. “He kept rolling out of the saddle first one way, then the other, while his security men did their best to keep him from falling as the stallion kicked out and reared up. It was quite dangerous.” Escaping unharmed, the delegates relocated to the scenic mountain rivers of the Talgar Gorge above Almaty, where to the horror of his handlers the sauced Yeltsin tried to dive into in the frigid, fast-moving waters that masked jagged rocks. Reluctantly diverted to a calmer backwater, Yeltsin then called for shots to warm up. And then more vodka at the farewell lunch. Knowing his guest’s propensity for drink, Nazarbayev ordered the erecting of a
yurt
—the traditional tent of steppe nomads—for a post-celebration nap. When the bearish Yeltsin emerged, he called for even more toasts, further postponing his flight home. “I had to order the police to keep everyone away from the airport so that nobody could see the President of Russia in such a condition. We had to push him up the aircraft steps to get him on his plane,” recalled Nazarbayev—unaware of the momentous events awaiting Yeltsin back in Moscow.
⁴

At his dacha outside Moscow, Yeltsin was rudely awoken not only by a splitting headache, but also by news of the State Committee on the State of Emergency’s takeover. Top aides and panicked opposition figures soon arrived, including Yeltsin’s confidant and bodyguard Aleksandr Korzhakov, speaker of the Russian legislature Ruslan Khasbulatov, the popular deputy mayor of
Moscow Yury Luzhkov, and even Anatoly Sobchak, mayor of the recently rechristened St. Petersburg.

Amazed to find his fax and phone lines still working, the hungover Yeltsin started making phone calls: first to Nazarbayev, his Kazakh host from the evening before.

“What is happening there, Boris Nikolayevich?”

“I don’t know,” slurred Yeltsin, “But I think this is a real coup and we must prepare ourselves for the worst.”
⁵
The president planned to denounce the takeover, call for nonviolent opposition, and stage a protest in downtown Moscow. During the Soviet era Moscow was not only capital of the Soviet Union—whose government ruled from the Kremlin—but also of the Russian Republic of the USSR, whose government was located at the “White House,” the towering parliament building on the Moscow River some three kilometers due west of the Kremlin. The White House was the symbol of Russian self-determination against Soviet power—he would go there.

To arrange safe passage, Yeltsin phoned paratrooper commander Pavel Grachev, whom Yeltsin had befriended months earlier over a vodka-fueled banquet. Describing their encounter, airborne commander Aleksandr Lebed (who also rose to prominence for supporting Yeltsin) simply invoked the famed words of Vladimir of Kiev a thousand years earlier: “‘drinking is the joy of the Russes’—and that centuries old tradition was not broken, as the entire cavalcade set upon the open bar [
brazhnyi stol
].”
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Supported by Grachev and Lebed, Yeltsin’s entourage made their way with surprising ease to the White House, where scores of protesters were already erecting protective barricades. Nonviolent protestors convinced the tank troops dispatched to the White House to defect and instead defend Yeltsin and the leadership of the Russian Republic. In an iconic moment captured by the global news media, Yeltsin—defying threats of sniper fire—courageously climbed atop a tank turret to address the crowd, denouncing the coup and calling for a general strike. Assuming command of the resistance, witnesses recalled how Yeltsin sternly declined offers of vodka at the White House, claiming “there was no time for a drink” at this moment of supreme crisis.
⁷

The exuberance and tension—serious and sober—at Yeltsin’s White House stood in stark contrast to the coup plotters just blocks away. That evening, the gray-clad Yanayev and the hard-liners of the State Committee on the State of Emergency held a press conference that was televised internationally as well as nationally. With the legitimacy of the coup unexpectedly challenged by stubbornly noncompliant reporters, the country and the world focused on the trembling hands of the befuddled Gennady Yanayev as evidence of the bankruptcy and irresolution of the plotters. This “stunning spectacle exposed these mediocrites to public scrutiny,” recalled Russian history professor Donald J. Raleigh. “A
sniffling Gennady Yanayev, his face swollen by fatigue and alcohol, had a tough time fielding the combative questions. His trembling hands and quivering voice conveyed an image of impotence, mediocrity, and falsehood; he appeared a caricature of the quintessential, boozed-up Party functionary from the Brezhnev era.”
⁸
That’s precisely who he was.

In the face of growing opposition and a military unwilling to follow orders, the coup collapsed on August 21. The police were dispatched to arrest the plotters. With the authorities banging down his apartment door, Interior Minister Pugo chose to shoot his wife before turning the gun on himself. Others sought refuge in the bottle: Pavlov was drunk when the authorities came to arrest him, “but this was no simple intoxication,” said Kremlin physician Dmitry Sakharov, “He was at the point of hysteria.” When the incoherent Vice President Yanayev was carried out of his Kremlin office—its floor strewn with empty bottles—he was too drunk to even recognize his one-time comrades who had come to arrest him.
⁹

In his subsequent interrogation, Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov was asked how he lost command of his own military. He faulted the battalion commanded by “Yeltsin’s personal friend,” an allusion to Grachev. “And when the second day began, I saw a whole busload of vodka being brought to them,” Yazov claimed. “That’s how they tried to encourage the soldiers to betray their duty. Just imagine drunks in the armored personnel carriers! That’s a whole different sort of danger.”
¹⁰
Although Yazov’s audacious claims bear a shocking similarity to the way that Empress Elizabeth won over the imperial regiments who placed her on the throne in 1741 (and again with the ascension of Catherine the Great in 1762), there is little evidence to substantiate them.

While Yazov was being interrogated on August 22, a relieved Mikhail Gorbachev landed safely back at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport alongside his visibly shaken family. Moscow looked the same as before, but in his brief absence the country had been transformed: while he nominally held on to authority, Yeltsin’s sober defiance bolstered his political legitimacy, especially when juxtaposed against those drunken members of the State Committee on the State of Emergency whom Gorbachev himself had appointed.

In the following months the Communist Party was outlawed. Gorbachev and his outmoded USSR were further marginalized as one union republic after another declared its independence. As devastating as it was, the coup was not the end of the Soviet Union. That began in December 1991, when representatives of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republics—the three republics responsible for creating the original USSR—met at a Belarussian hunting lodge and signed the Belovezh Accords, legally undoing that union and leaving Mikhail Gorbachev as a president without a country.

A jubilant Russian president Boris Yeltsin was joined by Ukrainian Republic president Leonid Kravchuk and Belarussian chairman Stanislau Shushkevich to negotiate the final dissolution. Yet unlike his sober resolve atop the tank, Yeltsin’s final political triumph over his rival Gorbachev was “lubricated in traditional fashion.” Indeed, witnesses recalled how Yeltsin got so drunk that he fell out of his chair just as the doors were opened for the ceremony. According to one witness:

Everyone began to come into the room and found this spectacular scene of Shushkevich and Kravchuk dragging this enormous body to the couch. The Russian delegation took it all very calmly. They took him to the next room to let him sleep. Yeltsin’s chair stayed empty. Finally, Kravchuk took his chair and assumed the responsibility of chairman. When Kravchuk finished his short speech to everyone about what had been decided, he said, “There is one problem that we have to decide right away because the very existence of the commonwealth depends on it: don’t pour him too much.” Everyone nodded. They understood Kravchuk perfectly.
¹¹

The Soviet Union was finished two weeks later, on December 21, 1991, back in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where the leaders of eleven soon-to-be post-Soviet republics (not including the Baltics or Georgia, which had already left the Union) signed into existence the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as a confederal alternative to Gorbachev’s USSR. As the assembled presidents discussed a retirement package for Gorbachev, Yeltsin was drunk again—only occasionally raising his head to mutter a slurred “What you say is right,” before passing out. Yeltsin again had to be carried from the room.