EXTRACT: CONOR O'CLERY's new book,
'Moscow: December 25, 1991', tells the story of the fall of the Soviet Union, an era-defining event hinged on the bitter relationship between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. On the 20th
anniversary of the end of the Cold War, this extract describes Gorbachev's last day in office, and illustrates Yeltsin's open resentment towards the reformist leader of the USSR and his wife, Raisa
BY THREE O’CLOCK in the afternoon of December 25th, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev is able at last to relax.
Everything is ready. There is nothing more to be done in preparation for his farewell address. Ted Koppel and Rick Kaplan are brought into his office to film more presidential thoughts for their ABC documentary. Anatoly Chernyaev, his aide, and Andrei Grachev, his spokesman and adviser, are there too.
One of the white telephones on the desk rings and Gorbachev picks up the receiver. It is his wife calling from the presidential dacha. This is not unusual. Raisa has long been in the habit of ringing her husband or his officials to involve herself in events. But this time it is different. She is in great distress.
The president makes a signal to the Americans that this is a private matter. “He got a call from Raisa,” Rick Kaplan would recall. “We were ordered to leave the room.” Raisa is in tears. She tells her husband in considerable agitation that several of Yeltsin’s security men have arrived at their dacha to serve them notice to quit immediately. They have also ordered the family to vacate the president’s city apartment at Kosygin Street on Lenin Hills within two hours.
The men say they have been authorised to take this action by a decree signed by the president of Russia that morning privatising the apartment. They have orders “to remove her personal belongings from the premises of the government representative” – the bureaucratic term for the president’s official residences. The unwelcome visitors have already started moving some of the Gorbachev family’s possessions out of the mansion.
Gorbachev is livid over the impudence and lack of courtesy Yeltsin’s security staff are showing his wife. It had only been decided two days previously that he would discontinue his activities as president of the Soviet Union on this evening, and there has been no time to prepare for moving. Moreover, he was specifically given a grace period of three more days by Yeltsin to vacate the country residence and the presidential apartment after his resignation. He does not even know if he will have the services of the Ninth Department of the KGB to provide a crew for packing and transport. The unit has been renamed and has come under Yeltsin’s control.
Previously he could always rely on Col Vladimir Redkoborody to protect them from any intrusions, but the former KGB intelligence officer, who just one week earlier was responsible for the security of both presidents, is now answerable only to Yeltsin.
This “especially vindictive act” against Raisa strikes Chernyaev as a boorish effort by Yeltsin to make the final day miserable for both Gorbachev and his wife. Grachev is also outraged. “Can you imagine! He was still acting president.”
Gorbachev tries to calm Raisa and promises to sort things out right away. Red blotches appear on the president’s cheeks as his fury mounts. He starts making angry calls, cursing and swearing as he demands to speak to the security officials responsible. He eventually gets Redkoborody on the line. “You’re really out of line and you’d better straighten up,” Gorbachev cries, lacing his words with profanities. “You’re talking about somebody’s home here. Do I have to report all this to the press? Please, what are you doing? Stop this madness.” Redkoborody blusters and promises to talk to the security men. He blames excessive zeal at lower levels but at the same time mentions he has orders from higher up. Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov later discloses that the command came directly from his boss, who ordered him to mount a campaign of daily harassment of Gorbachev’s staff at the dacha so that Yeltsin could move in right away.
Korzhakov sees his task as making life difficult for the Gorbachevs, but observes that they are “not in any rush to leave”.
Gorbachev’s anger has some effect. After his heated conversation with Redkoborody he is given more time to vacate the dacha. But Yeltsin’s security men have also arrived at the Gorbachevs’ state apartment in Lenin Hills where they are now rummaging around and removing their personal effects.
“Everything had to be done in a rush,” Gorbachev complains, after finding the mess the next day. “We were forced to move to different lodgings within 24 hours. I saw the results in the morning – heaps of clothes, books, dishes, folders, newspapers, letters and God knows what lying strewn on the floor.”
Yeltsin has as little respect for Raisa’s feelings as he has for Gorbachev’s. Raisa was hostile to him from the start, he believes, and this played a role in her husband’s attitude towards him. Yeltsin was among the first to criticise Raisa’s high profile as Gorbachev’s wife, complaining that “she unfortunately is unaware how keenly and jealously millions of Soviet people follow her appearances in the media”. When he began highlighting Gorbachev’s privileges as Communist party chief, Yeltsin blamed Raisa for encouraging his expensive tastes. “He likes to live well, in comfort and luxury,” he noted. “In this he is helped by his wife.” Yeltsin once tackled Gorbachev to his face at a Politburo meeting about Raisa’s “interference”. This impertinence deepened the rift between them.
SLIGHT AND ALWAYS elegantly dressed, Raisa is admired and envied by members of the Russian intelligentsia, and by quite a few ordinary Russians, as the first Soviet leader’s wife to show a sophisticated and humanising face to the world. She swept away the image of Politburo wives as tongue-tied women whose qualifications, it was said, were to be heavier than their husbands. Anatoly Sobchak’s wife, Lyudmila, considered that, although she lectured people like a schoolteacher, Raisa was “the first woman who dared to violate the Asiatic custom where the wife sits at home and doesn’t show her face”. Chernyaev thought she made the Gorbachevs look like “normal people” in the West. Gorbachev would say in later years that taking his educated, energetic wife with him on trips was a second revolution in addition to perestroika.
No leader’s spouse played a public role in Soviet life before, except Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who was a revolutionary and a member of the Politburo in her own right.
Yeltsin trumpeted to aides that Raisa had no business going with Gorbachev on foreign trips and playing a high-profile role on the international stage. When US ambassador Jack Matlock inquired of the Russian leader if he intended bringing his wife Naina on a trip to the United States, he retorted: “No. Absolutely not. I’ll not have her acting like Raisa Maximovna.” It might be acceptable in a rich, prosperous and contented society but “not in our country, at least not at this time”.
Gorbachev caused a rumpus years earlier when he told NBC’s Tom Brokaw that he discussed everything, including national affairs at the highest level, with his wife. As far as Yeltsin was concerned, Raisa’s influence had an adverse effect on Gorbachev’s attitude towards people, towards staff appointments and towards politics in general, and that she was “stand-offish and puts on airs”.
There have been several instances of Raisa taking an interest in affairs of state. Most criticism was aired in private but at the Congress of People’s Deputies, a delegate from Kharkov once told an outraged Gorbachev from the podium that he was incapable of escaping the “vindictiveness and influence” of his wife. On one occasion she took it upon herself to explain to Fyodor Burlatsky, editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, that the people were not ready for the free market.
Gorbachev’s wife was still dabbling in policy matters in the final months of the Soviet Union. Congress speaker Ivan Laptiev complained to British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite that he was rung by Raisa and it was 45 minutes before he could get off the phone, leading the diplomat to conclude that Gorbachev couldn’t get a word in edgeways at home.
Raisa was seen as rather frosty by the tradition-bound Kremlin wives, whom she in turn found to be “full of arrogance, suspicion, sycophancy and tactlessness”.
In his tell-all memoirs, Korzhakov claimed that Raisa once ordered General Yuri Plekhanov, the head of the KGB security department, to move a heavy bronze lamp standard. The order was given in front of his subordinates. Plekhanov would later become one of the August coup participants. “When I heard that, I thought, that’s why he betrayed Gorbachev.”
By contrast, Boris Yeltsin boasted that he never discussed work with the family. If his wife and daughters bombarded him with questions about the events of the day when he came home from work, he would tell them to be quiet, saying, “I don’t need politics at home.” Naina concurred in a comment she once made to the Novosti news agency: “He didn’t like it when someone began discussing political or economic issues at home. That is why we refrained from giving him advice, although we were certainly concerned over the situation in the country and wanted it to improve fast.” If she voiced an opinion he didn’t like, Yeltsin would tease Naina, a qualified sanitary engineer, by saying, “Just concern yourself with the plumbing.” She would retort, “If there was no plumbing, where would you go?”
The novelty of dealing with Raisa created a problem for the Soviet media. Mikhail Nenashev, the liberal head of Soviet television from 1989 to 1990, said she spoiled the mood of everyone when she became involved in a programme. He perceived her as unhealthily ambitious and he resented having to broadcast her speeches, which, like those of most spouses in her position, were often filled with empty banalities. If he cut them back, Gorbachev’s aides gave him a hard time. Her favourite correspondent, Sergey Lomakin, believed Raisa did a lot of good, such as recruiting musicians and doctors she met abroad to come to Russia.
But from the beginning, Yegor Ligachev, a high ranking official in the party and a frequent critic of Gorbachev, warned him about the negative effect of her over-exposure on television. Even the submissive Kravchenko, who succeeded Nenashev, told Gorbachev that the shorter any item about her on television, the better. When Gorbachev protested in a pained way that other world leaders travelled with their wives, Kravchenko responded that as a rule they didn’t make declarations on television.
Gorbachev knew well from the start that some people made negative comments at seeing Raisa by his side, such as, “Who does she think she is, a member of the Politburo?” Nevertheless, he valued her both as a close companion and a considerable political asset on his international travels. When he made a speech to French legislators in Paris on one of his first visits abroad, he glanced at Raisa in the audience and gave her what Paris Match described as a look full of tenderness.
She made a stunning impression in London in 1984 when she appeared at an evening function in a stylish white satin dress and gold lamé sandals with chain straps, and held forth on English literature with British ministers. In Washington she discussed world affairs with prominent American women at the Washington home of socialite Pamela Harriman. Woman’s Own magazine in the UK made her Woman of the Year in 1987.
The masses inevitably resented her celebrity. The Russian women who endured harsh living conditions and had no access to haute couture disliked her as much as the Russian men reared in the domestic tradition of domostroi, the practice dating back to Ivan the Terrible under which husbands dominated and wives obeyed. Her elegance was a reminder that special shops with luxury clothes existed that were inaccessible to ordinary citizens. She became the subject of frequent gossip.
Gorbachev complained in his memoirs that she supposedly went shopping with an American Express card when they didn’t know what an American Express card was, and that she allegedly spent large sums on fashion to compete with Nancy Reagan, when all her clothes were made by seamstress Tamara Makeeva in Moscow. He raged in particular about Yeltsin spreading the “lie” that he and Raisa had use of a gold credit card as a Politburo member. “It was a disgrace to read all this nonsense.”
This story originated, however, in the Western media. On June 6th, 1988, Time magazine reported that after admiring Margaret Thatcher’s diamond earrings on the trip to London four years earlier, Raisa “dropped into Cartier on New Bond Street to buy a pair ($1,780) for herself, paying with the American Express card”. Time also claimed she owned four fur coats, and wore three of them in one day in Washington, and it made the unlikely allegation that Mikhail Gorbachev was once overheard quipping, “That woman costs me not only a lot of money but also a lot of worry.”
Raisa was deeply offended by the many articles about her in Russia and abroad in which “accuracy was totally absent, and invention, myths and even slander became the ‘basis’ of what was written . . . If it had not been for my name appearing in the text I would never have believed they were writing about me.” Gorbachev blamed Western “centres of psychological warfare” out to undermine him, and “political riff-raff” in Russia who stirred up a campaign of innuendo against Raisa to discredit his reforms.
Much was also made in the American media of a cold war between Raisa and Nancy Reagan. The former actress found the Marxist-Leninist lady hard going. “She never stopped talking. Or lecturing, to be more accurate.” Nancy was taken aback when Raisa “snapped her fingers to summon her KGB guards” to get a different chair. “I couldn’t believe it. I had met first ladies, princesses and queens, but I had never seen anybody act this way.”
Raisa developed a much warmer relationship with Barbara Bush, although George Bush had difficulty appreciating her deadpan humour. At a dinner in the Soviet embassy in Washington, the US president joked to Raisa, as they were being entertained by a very overweight and unpretty Russian opera singer, “I think I’m falling in love.” “You’d better not,” she scolded him. “Remember Gary Hart.”
Bush concluded she had been briefed on the scandal surrounding the former senator, who dropped out of the 1988 presidential nomination race after a marital affair became public, and that she was not kidding. Bush invited Jane Fonda, Van Cliburn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Dizzie Gillespie and other celebrities to a lunch in the White House after the Soviet embassy made it known Raisa wanted to meet stars of show business.
Raisa broke new ground by becoming the first Soviet leader’s wife to engage in charitable work. She notably donated $100,000 in royalties from her husband’s books in 1990 to improve Russia’s treatment of childhood leukaemia and she became an active patron of a children’s hospital in Moscow. But she always maintained a reserve about her private life and endured the negative press in dignified silence.
“Why should I talk about myself?” she told family friend Georgy Pryakhin, who was engaged to record a series of conversations with her for a short sentimental book called I Hope. “I am not a film star or a writer or an artist or a musician or a fashion designer. And I am not a politician . . . I am the wife of the head of the Soviet state, supporting my husband as far as I can and helping him as I have always done ever since our young days when we linked our lives together.”
THE BOOK HAS just been published and no doubt has come to the attention of the Russian president, which goes some way to explaining his harsh actions towards her just when her husband is about to resign. Without naming him, she singles out Yeltsin and his acolytes for particular scorn in its pages.
They are party men who for 30 years expounded the merits of “barrack-room socialism” and were in charge of building society, and then announced that “they will gladly destroy it all, and set about its destruction”. She is scathing about how easily some former comrades have changed their coats, and how “yesterday’s energetic propagandist for atheism today vows eternal loyalty to Christian dogmas”.
Valery Boldin would later characterise Raisa as tough, harsh, domineering and fussy, an imperious first lady who delivered barbs and humiliating lectures to those working for her. According to him, she had no qualms about issuing orders over the phone to the general secretary’s aides and to several members of the government. Boldin enjoyed her company at times, however, and related how they shared the pleasure of surreptitiously sipping red wine together on an international flight at the height of the anti-alcohol campaign.
But he wrote that he recoiled when, on the same flight, she tried to order Gorbachev’s aides, whose allegiance was first and foremost to the party, to swear an oath of loyalty to her husband. They all declined.
In the opinion of the president’s interpreter, Pavel Palazchenko, who helped her with the English-language edition of I Hope, Raisa is not at all the aloof and didactic woman she often seems on television, but is an authentic person.
Georgy Shakhnazarov, one of Gorbachev’s closest aides, believed Gorbachev would have benefitted if he had listened to her advice more often, and that Raisa fulfilled her mission honourably and set a precedent for future spouses of Russian leaders.
But on their last day as the Soviet Union’s first couple, Gorbachev’s distress at Yeltsin’s treatment of his wife is deepened by his knowledge of a truth they have obscured from the world: that Raisa is at the end of her tether. The drama of their life is something that “ultimately she is not able to bear”. He acknowledges in time that she is a very vulnerable person. “She was strong but she had to endure a great deal.”
She was desperately ill at the time. Only two decades later, Gorbachev tells the newspaper Novaya Gazeta that after the August coup “she had a massive fit, or rather a micro stroke . . . Then she had a haemorrhage in both eyes. Her eyesight deteriorated dramatically. And the incredible stress continued.”
Gorbachev calls Raisa back and assures her that no one will intrude further into their state dacha that day. Still red in the face with anger after he replaces the receiver, he laments to his colleagues, “What a disgrace! Can you imagine, it was the living space for the family for seven years. We have several hundred if not thousands of books there. We would need time to pack them all.” He has little but contempt for the people around Yeltsin, and for those who denounce the communists for their system of privileges and are now jostling each other “like hogs at a trough”.
The eviction orders, delivered even before he has stepped down, make it clear to Gorbachev that he can no longer trust Yeltsin to honour the commitments in the transition package negotiated between them two days ago. He has to be prepared for more humiliations before the day is out.
It takes some minutes for him to calm down over the action of “those jerks” and turn his mind again to the farewell address he is to give in three and a half hours. When he recovers his composure, Gorbachev turns to Grachev and says, “You know, Andrei, the fact that they’re acting this way makes me certain that I am right.”
Moscow: December 25, 1991by Conor O'Clery, will be published this Thursday by Transworld Ireland. © Conor O'Clery
