The New Russia

What is it like when, after fate has raised you to leadership of a superpower, you find yourself in the kind of situation I was in during the first months of 1992? Not much fun, I can tell you.

My last month as president was tense and dramatic, but I continued doing all I could to keep open the prospect of renewal of the Soviet Union, and of cooperation and continuing ties between the former Soviet republics, which by then were already independent states. I did not cling to power at all costs, power for its own sake.

It was a bitter blow that Perestroika had been halted halfway, indeed when it was still only beginning. Already I was aware of just how deeply rooted the legacy of totalitarianism was, in our traditions, in people’s mindset and morality. It had seeped into almost every pore of the social organism. That deeply troubled me in those days and, more than 20 years later, still does.

My last day in the Kremlin

On 26 December 1991 I arrived at my office in the Kremlin, having agreed with Boris Yeltsin that I would vacate it by 30 December. There were papers and personal possessions to be sorted, but I was primarily interested in the responses coming in from different parts of the country to my announcement that I was standing down as president. I looked through the newspapers and letters and telegrams from Soviet citizens. Most were sympathetic and wishing me well, although there were others. The machinery of slander and lies was already grinding away on the subject of supposed Swiss bank accounts and villas abroad. It struck me that many people did not yet know they were being deprived of their country.

Here is a summary of those first telegrams and the reactions reported to me.

Most correspondents could understand the reasons for my decision. Many wrote appreciatively that they had been freed from the threat of nuclear war, from fear of a tyrannical government. They were thankful for the breakthrough to democratization and freedom and hoped I would soon return to national politics. There were calls for leaders of the former Soviet republics to ‘find a job worthy of Gorbachev’, many good wishes for the New Year, for good health, ‘inner peace’, and invitations to come with my family to visit.

Other telegrams criticized my decision because ‘the process of Perestroika is not yet complete’. There were doubts that the Commonwealth of Independent States would prove capable of uniting the peoples incorporated in the Soviet Union, of guaranteeing harmonious relations and genuine equality and making life better for them. There was much criticism that decisions about establishing the CIS had been taken in haste and were of dubious legality. Some hoped I would support the Commonwealth, or at least not try to hinder it. There were also accusations that I had caused the break-up of the country and wrecked the economy.

People wrote about the lack of bread, milk and other food supplies in the provinces for weeks at a time; about having to queue for hours in shops; about inadequate preparation being made for the winter; interruptions in the supply of electricity, fuel and heat; about how cold it was in their apartments. There were desperate pleas for urgently needed medicines and complaints about shortages of them. People wrote of the importance of paying urgent attention to the situation of troops in the former Soviet republics, and the social welfare of servicemen. Several correspondents urged me to appeal for support to the army, whose job it was ‘not only to defend the state, but the lives of all the people’.

I signed photos for the closest members of my staff, adding a message: ‘We have made a start, life goes on, and anyone who thinks the Gorbachev Era is over had better think again. This is only the beginning.’

While I was going through the mail, Raisa called in some distress to say the managers sent by Yeltsin’s administration were demanding we should move out of the presidential apartment in Moscow as well as the official country residence, while refusing to provide transport for the removal. I had to put the overzealous commandants in their place in a stoutly man-to-man and Russian manner.

I recently found the following note in my archive:

The woman notarizing a copy of the privatization contract on 29 December 1991 asked my assistant in surprise: ‘Is it really true that this extremely modest apartment is all the Gorbachevs now own?’

The presidential apartment we had been living in and were required to vacate with such urgency was, I heard, looked over by Yeltsin, but he did not care for it. With the approval of the new authorities, it was subsequently sold and resold several times.

That same day I gave the first interview since my resignation to Italian journalists from La Stampa and Repubblica. To their first question, ‘How are you feeling?’ I replied: ‘Once a decision has been taken, one usually feels better. Changes in my living conditions do not trouble me. My family and I are not being spoiled.’ Giulietto Chiesa, the correspondent from La Stampa, took the opportunity to ask some broader questions.

Russian and foreign journalists were interested to know whether I was planning to lead the opposition. I could see no justification for joining it, neither from a political point of view nor from that of the country’s interests. It was out of the question that Gorbachev might oppose the policy of reform in Russia. I said I might offer advice, express my opinion, but I supported the basic direction of the reforms and declared that we should support Russia’s leaders.

‘I cannot even imagine going over to the opposition. Opposition to what? Democratic reforms? Opposition to myself? That is not the kind of person Gorbachev is, as everyone well knows.’ I repeated that in almost all the interviews I gave in my last weeks as president, and said the same thing to Yeltsin.

On the evening of 26 December, I attended a farewell reception and briefing for journalists, arranged by my press office at the October Hotel. (The new authorities renamed it the President Hotel.) The journalists, Russian and foreign, applauded when I came in, and for more than two hours I answered questions, signed autographs, and received many good wishes. These are the main points I made to them:

The journalists asked me about my personal plans and I told them, as I told everyone during this period, that I had no intention of running away to hide in the woods or abroad. I would not be abandoning politics and public life, and continued to believe my main objective must be to do everything in my power to promote democratic reform in Russia, now in my new capacity, and to promote New Thinking throughout the world. I hoped these ends would also be served by the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies that I was establishing.

I had an interview with Japanese reporters scheduled for the morning of 27 December and decided to conduct it one last time in my Kremlin office. The journalists were already waiting, but, as I was approaching the Kremlin, I was warned over the car phone, ‘Yeltsin, Poltoranin, Burbulis and Khasbulatov have been sitting all morning in your office. They’ve drunk a bottle of whisky and are having a party.’

Yeltsin could not wait to occupy the presidential office, which those initiated in Kremlin affairs called ‘the Heights’. Unable to contain himself for the three days before 30 December, he and his company had prematurely stormed the heights and were having a booze-up to celebrate their victory. Two years later, these same men would be firing at each other as they destroyed parliament! Just before their importunate arrival, the remaining personal belongings of the president of the USSR had to be whisked away in a cart. I never set foot in the office again.

A new beginning, without presidential immunity

My new workplace was, and to this day remains, the Gorbachev Foundation. On 30 December 1991 it was registered at the Ministry of Justice as The International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies (‘Gorbachev Foundation’), with M. S. Gorbachev as its president.

The registered stakeholders were the Russian Branch of the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Mankind, headed by Academician Yevgeny Velikhov; the Foreign Policy Association, headed by Eduard Shevardnadze; Academician Stanislav Shatalin’s Foundation for Economic and Social Reform; and Russian citizens Mikhail Gorbachev, Grigoriy Revenko and Alexander Yakovlev. I became president of the Foundation and Revenko and Yakovlev, my fellow protagonists of Perestroika, became the vice-presidents.

On the instructions of the president of the Russian Federation, the premises of the former Social Science Institute of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were placed at the Foundation’s disposal. Maintenance of the buildings and all the Foundation’s activities were to be financed without any further material support from the state. Highly respected economists, sociologists and political scientists, specialists in the major areas of the humanities and public figures in Russia and a number of European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan all announced their intention to contribute.

My vision was that the Foundation would analyse the processes and publish reports on the history, successes and failures of the democratic restructuring of the USSR, and dispel all the nonsense, libels and falsification that had been thrown at it. Additionally, there would be a need for research to monitor the main processes at work in the life of post-Soviet Russia, and to consider options and alternatives as to how it might develop. Finally, the third major line of enquiry was to be the international and global processes in which our country would be living and developing.

Yeltsin raised no objection and, evidently in the first flush of victory, signed the needful decree. He did warily ask whether I was planning to turn the Foundation into an organization for opposing him. I said that, for as long as democratic reform continued in Russia, there could be no question of opposition on my part. On the contrary, I would support and defend it. He continued, nevertheless, to be apprehensive about opposition, and I presume that lay behind his announcement, when the presidential documents were being transferred, that there could be ‘no question’ of immunity from investigation and prosecution for the president of the USSR. ‘So,’ he added, ‘if you have anything on your conscience you would do well to repent while you are still the president.’ I never did ask for presidential immunities from Yeltsin or his successors. He did not take kindly to that.

Incidentally, when Yeltsin himself retired, he made sure he obtained presidential immunity for himself by a special decree signed by V. V. Putin. Meanwhile, for more than 20 years now, I have been living, working, and standing up for my beliefs without any guarantees of immunity from prosecution. Since 1999 I have had my daughter, Irina, at my side as vice-president of the Gorbachev Foundation.

My closest colleagues and assistants from the Office of the President of the USSR came to work at the Foundation, including Anatoly Chernyaev, Georgiy Shakhnazarov, Vadim Medvedev, Vadim Zagladin, Pavel Palazhchenko, Georgiy Ostroumov, Alexander Veber and Viktor Kuvaldin. They were all top-level professionals with distinguished titles and academic degrees. My technical assistants also came over, as did my irreplaceable shorthand typists, Irina Vagina and Tamara Mokacheva. Their motives were altruistic and based on conviction rather than the pursuit of money or other rewards: their salaries in the Foundation were substantially lower than they could have commanded as government employees. None of those who had worked with me in the Kremlin or at Communist Party headquarters in Old Square ended up with palatial mansions and luxurious villas, or had foreign bank accounts.

At this time, or a little later, the Foundation was further augmented by former staff from the Social Science Institute: Alexander Galkin, Yury Krasin, Vladlen Loginov, Irina Malikova and Yekaterina Zavarzina. From academic institutes we were joined by Valentin Tolstykh, Yelena Martynova and the Foundation’s present executive director, Olga Zdravomyslova.

The Foundation receives no support from the state. Its main source of funding consists of fees from my lectures, royalties from my books and individual donations. The remuneration of the staff is very modest, and bears no comparison with the income of officials in the bloated Russian bureaucracy, who again recently received a substantial pay rise, at a time when many of our citizens are finding life very difficult.

Russia and the other republics of the former Soviet Union were entering an unknown future. What could they expect? A radical break had occurred in the life of the country and of tens of millions of people. Was there hope we could overcome the negative effects of the rash, unlawful decision to ‘disband’ the Soviet Union? That we could get on track to develop the economy along free market lines, and find new arrangements for nations that for centuries had been living in the same country to collaborate? I have to admit that at the time I had no answers to these questions. When I speculated about the future, my main feeling was disquiet, not for myself, but for the country and our people. I tried to remain optimistic.

In his New Year speech on television, the president of Russia said the coming year of 1992 would be different: ‘Our task is to lay the foundations for a new life. I have said before and will say again: we have a difficult time ahead, but it will not last long. We are talking about six to eight months.’ Did Yeltsin believe his own rhetoric? He was, of course, being advised that the difficulties would be overcome in miraculously short order, and was being plied by foreign experts with news of how beneficial the experience of ‘shock therapy’ had been in a number of countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America and elsewhere. What is certain is that neither Yeltsin nor Yegor Gaidar, to whose team he entrusted implementation of the economic reform programme, can have imagined that the promised six to eight months of economic discomfort would, for most of Russia’s population, drag on for many painful years. For almost 15 years Russia’s standard of living was to remain lower than in the Soviet year of 1990. In some years it was catastrophically lower, at half the level.[1]

The Russian deputy prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, commenting on the ‘freeing’ of prices in the Russian Federation on 2 January 1992, stated in an interview for Russian journalists: ‘In the most favourable scenario, prices will increase in January and February by approximately 100 per cent in each month.’ In fact, the price of most basic goods immediately rose by 5–10 times compared with December 1991, and by 10–20 times compared with January 1991.

In early 1991, the minimum level of pensions and wages was stable, at 100 roubles, while the average salary was between 200 and 250 roubles. In early 1992, incomes of the lower paid rose by 350 per cent and that of those on middle incomes by 150–200 per cent. Against that, the price of bread went up by 1,000–1,500 per cent, milk by 1,500–2,000 per cent, butter and sour cream by 3,000 per cent, potatoes by 1,000–2,000 per cent in the shops and by 5,000–10,000 per cent in the markets.

The price shock of January 1992 had been preceded by a complete emptying of the shelves the previous December. Matches and salt had disappeared. Cereals and sugar were bought up by the sackful. A considerable contribution to this state of affairs was an announcement to the whole country by the president of the Russian Federation in October 1991 that he had decided in favour of ‘radical economic reform’. People realized this would inevitably result in price rises and rushed to stock up. In anticipation of higher prices, producers and trade organizations held back goods in their warehouses and distribution centres. As a result, expectations of inflation soared and in the final months of 1991 commercial activity was at a virtual standstill. Blame for the long hours of queueing and empty shelves was laid squarely on ‘Gorbachev’s Perestroika’. That was easy. It was less easy to blame Gorbachev for the fact that average consumption of foodstuffs in Yeltsin’s Russian Federation approached the corresponding level in the Soviet period only in the mid-2000s.

The price rises were painful in the extreme. As early as the first week of January 1992, the social and political situation in many Russian cities became tense and protest demonstrations broke out. President Yeltsin decided to travel to the Volga region to see, as he said, ‘at first hand the state of affairs in the provinces, how price liberalization is being implemented, and whether anything is being overdone’. Andrey Cherkizov, a journalist travelling with him, wrote: ‘The reform is causing distress. It is a harsh reform, with almost no accompanying safety net, a reform that is sailing very close to the wind.’ He saw this as explaining the president’s desire to ‘frantically find additional propaganda resources’. Instead of looking for ways to provide people with support and mitigate the impact of price increases, Yeltsin suddenly started talking about the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea and making remarks about not granting autonomous status to the Volga Germans. ‘First they started playing the Black Sea card, now it is the German card’, and all this delivered ‘in a steely tone of voice’. It seemed, Cherkizov concluded, that ‘the Yeltsin-Gaidar economic reforms need someone to confront’.

Indignation at rising prices was growing, but I believed it was best not to jump to conclusions. As I told the journalists who surrounded me at the entrance to the Foundation: ‘Eleven days into the start of price liberalization is too early to judge. I think the first priority for Russia’s leaders should be to de-monopolize production and mitigate the effect of price rises on the population.’

The search for a scapegoat, threats

With every passing day, however, it became clearer that Giulietto Chiesa had been right in anticipating that the new Russian government might start looking for a lightning conductor, or rather a scapegoat. Help came to them from a seemingly unlikely quarter. The leaders of the Communist opposition now thunderously proclaimed – as, until recently, the radical liberals had been doing – that the name of the ‘main and basic culprit of all the ills of Russia and the Russian people’ was, wait for it: ‘Mikhail Gorbachev’!

In Moscow the Russian Communist Workers Party, the Communist League, and Workers’ Russia called on people to demonstrate on Manezh Square against the ‘ridiculous’ free market, ‘ridiculous’ privatization and the collapse of the country and army, but loudest of all they called for Gorbachev to be put on trial. Here is how Den’ [Day], a newspaper edited by that longstanding opponent of Perestroika, Alexander Prokhanov, put it in a special issue:

I should mention here that the author of this literary gem is today an all but permanent fixture on the screens of the state television channels, appearing in the second decade of the twenty-first century as an active supporter and would-be ideologist of the current Russian government, developing a new ‘National Idea’. Many active in the United Russia Party are zealous disciples of Prokhanov and have taken up not only his anti-Gorbachev rhetoric but also the threats directed at my person.

These were first heard in early 1992. The Moscow Organizational Bureau of the Russian Communist Workers Party appealed to the Supreme Soviet and the forthcoming Congress of People’s Deputies to

The Communists were joined by lawyers acting for those accused in connection with the State Emergency Committee case, who demanded interrogation of Gorbachev and a ban on his travelling abroad. This was followed by the first threats from the new Russian government. Deputy Prosecutor General Yevgeny Lisov, in an interview for the New York Newsday, announced that he considered Gorbachev ‘a suspect’ in a case investigating financing by the CPSU of foreign Communist parties.

Later, at hearings into the financial affairs of the CPSU, Lisov admitted that there was no direct evidence of Gorbachev’s involvement in the case, but claimed he bore ‘collective responsibility’ because at Politburo meetings where such matters were discussed he ‘never voted against’. Altogether, attempts were made from all directions to create a negative aura around me.

I reacted to it as any man with a clear conscience and strong nerves should. I had no intention of ‘fleeing’ anywhere and these people could not intimidate me. What did disturb me was that Raisa and my family and friends were being greatly upset by what was going on.

I was often asked during this period for my assessment of what was happening in Russia and what the response should be. This was a matter of interest to our Western partners also. When I met Rodric Braithwaite, the British Ambassador, in January, I said the reforms in Russia and other CIS countries were being carried through under difficult conditions and with considerable costs, but were in need not so much of commentary as of material support. I reminded him of the agreements reached during my participation in the London summit of the G7 leading industrial nations in July 1991, and again called for maximum support for Russia’s radical economic reforms, because if they failed that would affect all democratic forces. As regards the future of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the most important thing was to help it become a commonwealth not only in word but also in deed.

The Gorbachev Foundation: its first reports

The Gorbachev Foundation was hard at work even before its official launch. We attracted authoritative research specialists to analyse the situation in Russia, and my colleagues associated with Perestroika joined in. At the end of January we met up to try to evaluate what was happening, to probe what was driving events and suggest steps to mitigate negative tendencies. Some of those assessments were to prove only too accurate. It is a pity they were ignored.

The experts were particularly exercised over whether integration of the republics of the ‘disbanded’ Soviet Union was still possible. The historian Grigoriy Vodolazov put forward the idea of organizing the CIS as a ‘multi-structural community’. ‘Currently,’ he said, ‘the prevailing intention is to set up the CIS with a standard pattern of association of the republics, but I would recommend providing for less intimate relationships within its framework, alongside closer links where possible.’

I was naturally concerned about these longer-term problems, but also about the course being taken by the economic reforms, which amounted to no more than price liberalization, indiscriminate privatization, opening the market to imports and hoping for foreign aid. My attitude was becoming increasingly critical, and in an interview for the Italian weekly Panorama and Russia’s Literaturnaya Gazeta [Literary Gazette], I reminded their readers that in my last conversation with Yeltsin in December 1991 I had said I was not planning to develop an opposition movement, but that did not mean I would abstain from criticism of weaknesses and mistakes. Of these there had already been plenty within the past month. I did not pull my punches:

In an interview for Komsomolskaya Pravda, I explicitly warned that, if no adjustments were made to fiscal policy, no measures taken to stimulate production, and no effective institutions established capable of controlling the economic and political situation in the CIS, we might find ourselves facing a major political crisis.

December 1991: politics and morality

For most of January I worked on my book December 1991: My Position.[2] It is a documentary account of my efforts to save the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the August coup. The publishers wrote in their annotation: ‘M. S. Gorbachev introduces the reader to the climate of December 1991, a month of immense importance for the future of the country and personally for the president of the USSR. His comments and reflections link excerpts from discussions, interviews, notes of telephone conversations, statements and other documents.’

I found work on the book hard-going, primarily in emotional terms. Everything was still raw in my memory, but I had a tremendous urge to tell the truth about that period and to think through everything soberly. In my introduction I wrote:

Just before the book was due to be published, I decided to add a kind of second preface, and felt a lecture I gave during my visit to Germany on 8 March 1992 in Munich fitted the bill. Here are the main points I made:

We managed occasionally to get out to the theatre. On 27 January, Raisa and I were invited by Oleg Yefremov to a function at the Moscow Art Theatre. On 29 January, we attended a celebration of Nezavisimaya Gazeta at Cinema House. Since stepping down from the presidency, this was my first major public appearance and opportunity to meet a large number of people. Many shook hands, and I was able to talk to some, to reminisce and discuss. Members of the intelligentsia had reacted in a variety of ways during Perestroika, and relations with many of those in Cinema House that day were also to develop in different ways. That evening, however, was a celebration of Glasnost and freedom. Speaking to the gathering, I said that this achievement of Perestroika needed to be protected and defended, whatever zigzags might lie ahead for Russia’s historical development.

On 28 February I had a meeting at the Gorbachev Foundation with young members of democratic parties who were attending courses at the Foundation’s Social Science Centre. Most were from the Democratic Party and the Free Russia People’s Party. The budding politicians impressed me favourably. They were not interested in so-called ‘political technology’, which later came so much into vogue and was often no more than political chicanery, but in the real problems of the country and how it could be reformed. I supported that:

I felt it important to add:

Among the questions asked was one about ownership of land. It was tempting to latch on to simple solutions in agrarian matters and there were a lot of illusions around. I replied:

I talked about how the situation was developing in the country in the first months of 1992 in an interview for Komsomolskaya Pravda. In February the government adjusted its policies, and by the end of the month the situation was less acute. I remarked on this, because I do not gloat when things get worse:

At the same time, I decided to take the opportunity to speak loud and clear to the whole country, through a newspaper with a circulation of many millions, against the smear campaign I was being subjected to by the Communists under Gennadiy Zyuganov and their supporters. The situation was ludicrous: the Communist Party’s reactionaries were denouncing Gorbachev the Democrat, while the radicals were denouncing Gorbachev the Communist Party Boss. Every newspaper every day could be relied on to vilify Gorbachev. Responding to the lot of them, I said:

Salvation in work

I celebrated my 61st birthday at home with my family. There were many greetings, often from people I had not previously known, and the apartment was overflowing with flowers. There were telegrams from all over the place: from big cities and the distant provinces. Some were short, just three or four words wishing me good health and fortitude. I and my family found that particularly touching. People understood that we were in a difficult situation and wanted to lend us support. Some of the letters were very carefully considered and thoughtful. We were cheered to see that people, citizens, understood that change was essential and that life could be better.

On 3 March 1992 we held the official launch of the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies, the Gorbachev Foundation. That day, hundreds of invited guests streamed towards our headquarters on Leningrad Prospekt. There were representatives of Moscow academic and artistic organizations and public figures, among them Eduard Shevardnadze, Yevgeny Primakov, Yevgeny Velikhov, Alexander and Yegor Yakovlev, Nikita Mikhalkov and other famous people. There were many foreign guests, journalists and diplomats, in total some 1,000 guests. The Russian government was represented by Vice-President Alexander Rutskoy. In a brief speech, I said:

To investigate objectively what was happening in the country and the world, to provide a platform for intellectual searching with the involvement of representatives from a broad spectrum of political forces, except, needless to say, the extremists – such was the mission I and my associates envisaged for the Foundation. Looking back, I can only say the Foundation has been fully up to the task. It has been a success.

The Foundation began work, and has continued all these years, under far from easy conditions. The first priority was to raise funds for its research and charitable projects. We received, and still receive, no financial support from the state. With time, the main source of funding came to be from my lecture tours abroad. That is nothing to be ashamed of. Giving lectures is not just a way of earning fees, but an opportunity to talk to people about what is happening in the outside world and in Russia. Despite the difficulties of the present situation in our country, despite my critical attitude towards many aspects of what goes on, I always tell my audiences, be they academics, students or businessmen, Russia will get back on her feet; she will be a major player in global processes. There have been times of trial and times of troubles in her history before, but she has always been reborn and given much to mankind. So it will be this time also.

Attempts to ‘destabilize’ me

Gradually, my post-presidential life developed a routine and I found myself with a busy schedule. There were many invitations to speak abroad, from Germany, the United States, Japan and Italy. Preparing for these visits took up a lot of time. I consulted academics and experts, and worked on important addresses to the German Parliament and US Congress.

Meanwhile, attempts to neutralize me continued with various ‘charges’: I had been involved in a conspiracy connected with the State Emergency Committee’s coup; I had been embezzling the CPSU’s funds; and so on. Someone evidently saw all this as a high priority. While the libels were coming from the likes of long-forgotten Deputy Sergey Belozertsev, they could be ignored. When, however, they came from the president of Russia, I asked Prosecutor General Valentin Stepankov to conduct an enquiry into the substance of the charges.

On 15 March 1992, the prosecutor general, replying at a press conference in Moscow to a question from Andrey Pershin, correspondent of the Interfax News Agency’s Presidential Messenger, said the prosecutor’s office had conducted an investigation at my request. No hard facts had been found in the files on the case of the State Emergency Committee or been presented by Belozertsev. A document to this effect had, the prosecutor general stated, been issued to Gorbachev.

I also talked to the prosecutor general about the ‘case of the Communist Party Finances’. I had nothing to hide, and it was clear from the outset that there was a great deal of groundless speculation in the allegations. I could see that certain people were trying to exploit the law-enforcement agencies and courts against me, but considered it important to demonstrate respect for them. Our discussion was conducted in a civilized manner, and there was no talk of ‘restrictive measures’ like a ban on my travelling abroad. We agreed to meet a second time. This took place in early April and lasted about an hour and a half. Here is the Interfax agency report:

I also answered questions about the case of the CPSU’s money put to me by Vadim Belykh and Valeriy Rudnev, reporters from Izvestiya [The News]:

And then in March they did. There was a presentation at the Centre for the Preservation of Contemporary Documentation, created on the basis of the archives of the Central Committee. It was announced that more than 160 million documents from the Party archives, ‘reflecting the mechanisms of governance that existed in the USSR prior to August 1991’, would be made accessible to almost anyone interested in reading them. The media reported:

What can we add to this report today, after more than 20 years have passed? Many important documents ‘disappeared’ into foreign archives, but to this day no compromising documents against Gorbachev have been found. We talk of something being ‘as difficult as finding a black cat in a dark room’. That is even more difficult if the cat is not there in the first place.

The ‘Trial of the CPSU’

Meanwhile, the situation in the country was developing unpredictably. The reforms were increasingly being implemented in line with the ‘shock therapy’ approach, devised by the International Monetary Fund for countries whose economies were fundamentally different from that of Russia, but accepted by our reformers as virtually a panacea. In some countries the schemes worked, if at a high price, but in Russia implementing them brought about a sudden fall in production and mass impoverishment of the population. One of the consequences of this was increasing friction between the Supreme Soviet of Russia, which until recently had given Yeltsin unconditional support, and the president’s team, who insisted on a ‘resolute’ continuation of shock therapy. In April, these tensions almost boiled over at the Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia.

The hawks among Yeltsin’s supporters and advisers told him he should disperse the Congress. He did not take their advice, and gave a fairly conciliatory speech there, stating after it was over that he had succeeded in rescuing the reform programme. At a press conference in Moscow, I said: ‘If the president had followed the advice he was receiving and dispersed the Congress, the consequences for society would have been tragic.’ On this occasion the worst was avoided, but I found myself increasingly at odds with the policies the government was so aggressively pursuing. At the same press conference, I warned:

I commented that there was a current vogue for resolute politicians, ‘but resolute people alarm me. They could easily wreck everything that has been achieved in the past seven years. It is vital to base policies on what is possible in terms of the actual economic, political and social situation.’

As time passed, however, it became increasingly obvious that the president and his team had decided to race ahead regardless of the consequences. The economy responded to their ‘resolute action’ by collapsing at an accelerating rate, and the life of ordinary people became increasingly hard. This was evident when someone came up with the idea of distracting attention from the rigours of the transition to a free market by ‘putting the Communist Party on trial’.

The occasion was a petition to the Constitutional Court by a group of deputies, former Party officials, asking the court to examine the legality of Yeltsin’s decrees dissolving the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and of the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic]. In response, Oleg Rumyantsev, the secretary of the Constitutional Commission, filed a counter-petition to review the legitimacy of the CPSU itself. The Court decided to consider both matters jointly. Thus began the saga of the Trial of the CPSU, a pernicious enterprise from the outset, which served only to deepen the divisions in Russian society.

In late May, at a meeting between Yeltsin and the representatives he sent to attend sessions of the Constitutional Court (Secretary of State Gennadiy Burbulis, Member of the Supreme Soviet Sergey Shakhrai, and Director of the Intellectual Property Agency Mikhail Fedotov) the idea was proposed of turning the trial of the Communist Party into a ‘new Nuremberg Trial’. This was confirmed the same day by Shakhrai at a press conference. As the Constitutional Court considered the ‘case’, it became clear that those who had instigated it, in fact both sides, were eager to turn the Trial of the CPSU into a Trial of Mikhail Gorbachev.

There could be no two ways about it: this was an attempt to exploit the Russian judicial system to exert pressure and settle scores in a political struggle. There is no need to dwell on the absurdity of the intention of delivering a legal assessment of Soviet history and the constitutionality of the Communist Party. My decision was unequivocal and irrevocable: I would take no part in these antics.

Not everybody understood my reasons, and even some of my colleagues urged me to show respect for the court and find some manner of means for taking part in the ‘trial’. That would have had me playing for both teams at the same time, and moreover, both were equally determined to blame all the country’s ills on Gorbachev in order to exonerate themselves. By this I mean the reactionary wing of the disbanded Communist Party and the extreme radicals in Yeltsin’s entourage. If I allowed them to lead me by the nose, I would only be contributing to a further heightening of social tensions, a splitting of society into opposing camps and diversion of attention away from pressing problems which were snowballing.

The signals emanating from Yeltsin at this time left no doubt as to his intentions towards me: he wanted to humiliate and, at the very least, silence me. On 2 June the president’s press secretary, Vyacheslav Kostikov, issued the following statement:

The statement continued that Boris Yeltsin, noting that such utterances by M. Gorbachev were both dangerous and intolerable, would be forced to ‘take the necessary legal steps to ensure that the reform programme was not harmed’.

So that was what was threatening reform in Russia!

My response to this warning shot took the form of a statement from the Press Service of the Gorbachev Foundation:

Yeltsin’s team was meanwhile busily preparing for a trial in the Constitutional Court. Representation of the president’s interests was delegated to officials close to Yeltsin, under Secretary of State Burbulis. On the day before the trial, he publicly expressed his confidence that the court would arrive at a verdict ‘conducive to continuation of reform by Boris Yeltsin’s team’ and would uphold the constitutional ban on the CPSU, and that this would ‘prove the path to normal state governance in the Russian Federation’.

With the beginning of the politically motivated Trial of the Communist Party, I found myself again under fire from two directions. More precisely, I was under a synchronous political and propaganda attack from all directions by radicals of the left and right. Den’, the mouthpiece of sundry anti-reform forces, demanded that Gorbachev should be put in the dock for having instigated the State Emergency Committee coup, while simultaneously demanding that all the coup participants should be released.

Yeltsin’s side were threatening to ‘take measures’, to discredit me, and intriguing to force me to leave the country. Both sides were eager to take it out on Gorbachev in order to divert public attention from their own very serious failures and the consequences of their policies.

On 29 July, literally the day after I announced my decision on moral grounds to have no truck with the trial at the Constitutional Court, the Finance Ministry of the Russian Federation, through its Audit Department, set up a special commission to scrutinize the economic and financial activities of the Gorbachev Foundation.

The Commission, which comprised no fewer than 10 experienced auditors under the direction of the Chief Audit Inspector of the Finance Ministry, began a total audit of the Foundation’s financial records. And all this within five months of the Foundation’s official opening and almost six months before the accounts for the fiscal year were due! It was obvious that such an extraordinary inspection could only have been initiated by the man at the top. That fact, against a background of major economic and financial upheaval, the embezzlement of billions of roubles of public money and property, bureaucratic malfeasance and rampant corruption in every sector of the economy and government of the country, speaks volumes about the character and the moral and intellectual level of the Russian government of the time.

Unfortunately, the same sort of thing goes on in front of our eyes even today.

First results of shock therapy

Summer was coming to an end, but this year August at least brought no catastrophic events, other than that the economic situation was approaching crisis levels. The decline of industrial output continued, due mainly to the policy of shock therapy and the rupturing of economic ties between the republics of the former Soviet Union. Reminiscing about that period, Boris Yeltsin wrote later: ‘In September 1992, I looked at the statistics for the economy over the first nine months. They were horrifying.’ In the same place he comments:

I could not put it better myself. The only plus was ‘elimination of shortages of goods’. What a price that came at! By the end of the year, prices had risen 2,600 per cent and inflation was running at 5–7 per cent a week. The savings of those who in the Soviet period might have been categorized as middle class had been rendered worthless. Instant liberalization of prices and hyperinflation had effectively expropriated the population’s savings to the tune of some 800 trillion roubles, or $160–170 billion. In 1992, Gross Domestic Product fell by almost 20 per cent and industrial production by 18 per cent.

The government was now pinning its hopes on swift privatization of state property. Behind closed doors, a voucher privatization scheme was hastily drafted over the summer. It differed substantially from the ‘popular privatization’ plans being worked on by academics in the Supreme Soviet, the Moscow Mayor’s Office and other institutions. Once again, the policy was to rush it through without consultation. On 23 August, the president signed a decree introducing voucher privatization on 1 October, with the intention that it should come into force within a week, before the Supreme Soviet deputies returned from their summer break. This was a straightforward violation of the constitution, under which privatization of state property fell within the competence of the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet.

A year after the coup

On 17 August 1992, I arranged a press conference for the numerous journalists who had asked for interviews in connection with the first anniversary of the August coup. Today, when many years have passed, I reflect on how many of these anniversaries there have been, and how every time they provide an excuse for unfounded conjecture, defamation and libel. In 1992 that was just beginning. The coup plotters, newly repentant, began one after the other to offer up new accounts of the events with the manifest purpose of whitewashing themselves and discrediting Gorbachev. Meanwhile, the consequences of their mischief-making were becoming only too evident, and that was the main point I made at the news conference.

The State Emergency Committee coup, I said, was a criminal escapade rejected by the citizens of Moscow and the country at large, but which, ultimately, played into the hands of those opposed to maintaining a single unified state. I included among those complicit in destruction of the Soviet Union the government of Russia proper, which, in December 1991, torpedoed the possibility of concluding a new Union Treaty of the sovereign states that had comprised the USSR.

In reply to a question about the possibility of another coup, I said, ‘Only a crazy idiot would embark on such a course’, but I warned that the growing levels of mass discontent had the potential to generate forces far from democratic. ‘I think,’ I said, ‘that the present government is at risk of losing out in exactly the same way Gorbachev lost out: by falling behind on key political issues.’

I also said I was shocked by the levels of corruption in the current state institutions, to which we had entrusted the reforms and our own destiny. ‘It has come to such a state of affairs that a guidebook has been published in America listing the names of officials in our new government and other institutions and specifying the number of dollars they require as bribes for resolving issues.’

Under the guise of ‘popular privatization’, there are plans to rob the population. Everybody will be given a voucher equivalent to a month or a half-month’s salary, and those who have been stealing and looting the economy will buy up the securities from the people and seize, first, economic and then political power.

My judgements were harsh but, unfortunately, proved only too accurate.

I had also to mention the discreditable role of the press: ‘My statements to the people are often simply ignored and suppressed. If anything does get published, it is only in a much curtailed form. The press has become subservient to the government. It too toes the line, aiming only to survive.’ What was needed, I said, was a programme of emergency measures for Russia: ‘We need a new economic reform programme around which all patriotic democratic forces can unite. On a basis of consent it will be possible to take wide-ranging, radical decisions to stabilize society and avert a rift and further deterioration of the situation.’

My stance

The pressure on me was ramped up. It was insisted I must take part in the charade of the Trial of the Communist Party, whose dangers were becoming increasingly obvious. I decided I should state my position publicly in the form of an open letter to the Constitutional Court. Here it is in its entirety:

My open letter to the Constitutional Court enraged the instigators and perpetrators of this piece of nonsense, because it undermined the whole sensation on which it was premised: a show trial of the president of the USSR. The court gave a ruling ‘officially requiring’ me to ‘appear when summoned to give witness statements’.

The president of the court, Valeriy Zorkin, accused me of contempt of court. One of the judges, and after him Minister of Justice Nikolai Fedorov, threatened to instigate criminal proceedings against Gorbachev for failing to appear before the Constitutional Court, although the law regulating the court provides for no penalties other than a fine of 100 roubles. They all seemed to be overlooking the classical principle, going back to Roman law and familiar to every law student, of nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege [no crime, no punishment without a law]. Some Russian judges and courts in the twenty-first century could do with being regularly and loudly reminded of this classic principle.

It finally came to the point where the former president of the USSR was banned from travelling abroad. The announcement was published by the Press Service of the Constitutional Court. They had evidently suddenly forgotten or, on the contrary, had decided to remind everyone, of the effect of being banned from travelling abroad during the Soviet period: that very wall of prohibitions which had been demolished by none other than the president of the USSR.

On 3 October I wrote to the Constitutional Court, the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Security asking to be informed by whom and on what legal basis measures had been taken that affected my civil rights, responsibilities and legitimate interests. The Constitutional Court replied, ‘All decisions of the Constitutional Court affecting your interests have already been made known to you. You may familiarize yourself directly with the other documents at the Constitutional Court.’

The only conclusion possible from this response was that the decision had not been taken in the Constitutional Court, and they had no documentation to show me. Quite obviously, the measures taken by ‘the relevant authorities’ had been based solely on the principle of ‘law over the telephone’ and were hence illegal.

Then, without warning, on the morning of 7 October the Gorbachev Foundation offices were cordoned off by the police and sealed. The Foundation’s staff were prevented from going in to work. At the entrance a crowd of Moscow and foreign correspondents gathered; for them, the sealing off of the Gorbachev Foundation was a big story.

More and more people were arriving and I was warned over my car telephone that a regiment of mounted police would arrive shortly. I asked for my request that everyone should remain calm and orderly to be passed on. Arriving at the Foundation, I found myself giving an impromptu press conference. I surmised that the decree, effectively confiscating the Foundation’s property, had resulted from my blunt criticism of the president of Russia, and described the government’s action as ostentatious despotism. I suggested that the government was on the verge of paralysis and was trying, by this sort of conduct, to assert its authority.

Speaking about the situation in the country, I said that, having flung Russia into an unregulated market, the government now did not know what to do next. Yes, we needed to adopt market relations, but should do so gradually, taking account of the interests of the bulk of the population. It seemed that now the best way forward would be to form a coalition government.

I talked also about the workings of the Constitutional Court, which had undertaken to consider the ‘case against the CPSU’, even though that was no part of its remit. They had succeeded only in presiding over a political free-for-all, and meanwhile the federation was splitting apart and the economic situation was going from bad to worse.

As later became apparent, the previous day the president of Russia had signed a decree rescinding his own decree of 23 December 1991 and transferring the building and property at the disposal of the Foundation to the beneficial use of the Financial Academy of the Government of the Russian Federation. The Financial Academy was instructed to lease to the Gorbachev Foundation at a price to be agreed premises totalling 800 m². The Foundation had previously occupied 3,500 m² in the building.

Negotiations began between officials of the State Property Agency and the Foundation’s managers. The government representatives did eventually agree to allow staff in to collect their work materials and personal belongings.

All this was acted out in front of numerous reporters. Before long, the government representatives were asking the Foundation’s staff to calm the press down and bring some order to the reporting of the outrage, which was already echoing round the world. I and my colleagues did what we could, and stated that the Foundation intended to protest against the government’s abuse of power solely by lawful means. The Foundation issued the following statement:

My travel ban redounded to the discredit of those who had come up with such an inane idea. On 9 October, our Foundation was visited by the French Ambassador, Pierre Morel. He conveyed to me the sympathy and support of President François Mitterrand, his best wishes for the Foundation’s success and his invitation to visit France at a time of my choosing.

From press reports, we learned that the ‘Gorbachev affair’ had been raised in London at a meeting between the Russian Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev, Prime Minister John Major and the British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. Kozyrev described as an ‘unfortunate coincidence’ the simultaneous ‘temporary moratorium’ on travel abroad of the former USSR president and the government measures taken in respect of the Gorbachev Foundation.

Next, following the death of the former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, his friends and the German government invited me to take part in the funeral of this outstanding political and public figure, with whom I had a long history of friendship and constructive cooperation. Chancellor Helmut Kohl addressed a request to the Russian government to allow me to come to Germany for the funeral. Thereupon, ‘justice over the telephone’ clicked into action, also making it clear who had been behind the ban in the first place.

The president of the Constitutional Court now informed the press that President Boris Yeltsin had requested him to consent to Mikhail Gorbachev’s travelling to Germany to take part in the funeral of ex-Chancellor Willy Brandt. The Constitutional Court, Zorkin went on, had decided it was permissible to hear evidence from Mikhail Gorbachev before his trip abroad in connection with ‘humane considerations’, and after it. This did not mean, Zorkin added, that the Constitutional Court had gone back on its decision to summon Gorbachev to appear in court to testify.

Meanwhile, batches of ‘compromising material on Gorbachev’ continued to be fed to the press. Nothing was off limits: the tragedy of the South Korean passenger plane shot down in the Far East of the USSR in 1983; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979; the August 1991 coup; and, finally, ‘the latest sensation – concealment from the Poles and the world of who was really responsible for the Katyn massacre’. This release was saved up for the final sitting of the Constitutional Court in the trial of the Communist Party and came just as I was attending the farewell for Willy Brandt.

Overlooked was the fact that it was I who, during his visit to Moscow, handed over to President Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland archive documents found by Soviet historians testifying to the fact that Lavrentiy Beria and Vsevolod Merkulov were responsible for the atrocities in the Katyn forest. This was reported in a statement from the TASS news agency of 13 April 1990, where the Soviet side expressed deep regret at the Katyn tragedy, one of the heinous crimes of Stalinism.

When, a few days before leaving the Kremlin, I passed over to Yeltsin the contents of the secret archive of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which contained some 3,000 ‘special folders’, I gave him also the Politburo documents with the signed decisions of Stalin and his immediate entourage on a note from Beria dated March 1940. This had an appendix about the shooting of thousands of Polish prisoners of war. We agreed at that time, in December 1991, that Yeltsin would give these documents to the Poles. I can only guess why he did not do so during the visit to Moscow of President Lech Wałęsa in summer 1992. Perhaps even then he was keeping them back for use in his Nuremberg Trial of the CPSU and Gorbachev.

Despite the pressure to which I was being subjected, I stood firm. I expressed willingness to meet the president of the Constitutional Court, but not as part of any trial. I did so not out of fear for my reputation, or, indeed, my life. Lacking presidential legal immunity, I was prepared for anything. I was guided by considerations of principle, considering that the exploitation of the law and constitutional oversight for political purposes was as unlawful as it was immoral. I considered it tantamount to elevating despotism to a policy, and destroying the fundamentals of modern governance and civilization.

Evidently aware that he had painted himself into a corner, Valeriy Zorkin went on television to deliver a statement, demeaning for a judge and offensive to me:

I protested against these remarks by the president of the Constitutional Court and, as provided for by the law on information, demanded that I should be given an opportunity to respond to these accusations and clarify my position in a live broadcast with the same format and the same team of presenters.

The chairman of the Russian State Television and Radio Corporation, Oleg Poptsov, on the grounds that Zorkin’s broadcast press conference had ‘not been organized on the initiative of RTR’, refused to give me airtime. In principle, he went on to say, he did not exclude the possibility of broadcasting ‘within reasonable limits’ M. S. Gorbachev’s answers in a video recording in news or other programmes, although this would not be possible in the immediate future mainly ‘for technical reasons’.

Well, that is what happens to people who are not free to act as they choose, and not prepared to stand up for a matter of principle. Their technology inexplicably breaks down, and they destroy something of fundamental importance in themselves.

The controversy surrounding the Trial of the CPSU, and the whole climate in society and politics, were increasingly fraught with intolerance and authoritarianism. The main features of the opposed parties, or gangs, were mutual hostility and a desire to crush all who stood in their way or were political adversaries. Literally every day of that first post-Soviet year further strengthened my belief that we were heading towards a new setback for the growth of democracy initiated by Perestroika that might even bring it to an end.

I decided to speak out publicly about this just as soon as might be, and the opportunity presented itself at the airport, where I found journalists awaiting my return from Willy Brandt’s funeral. The vendetta and vengeful behaviour of my political opponents was not only a campaign to discredit Gorbachev.

That prediction was made less than a year before the Supreme Soviet of Russia was bombarded by tanks.

The Trial of the CPSU proved a complete damp squib, largely, I believe, because of the stance I adopted. This was not a matter of personalities, just that, in the end, the Constitutional Court had to agree with my points of principle. The Court came to the only possible logical conclusion: consideration of the constitutionality of the CPSU should be terminated on the grounds that the CPSU ‘had effectively disintegrated’ in August–September 1991 and ceased to be a nationwide organization. Could it not have taken such an obvious decision at the outset, without all the excited political shenanigans?

The provocative intentions of those who set up the Trial of the CPSU had been frustrated, but all the time I was watching what was going on, I could not help feeling its future consequences were likely to be very negative.

The slide towards social catastrophe

The efforts of the Russian president and government, and of orthodox communists stuck in the past, to intimidate and wear me down with endless accusations and slanders did not, of course, enhance my life. They were an irritant, but far more disquieting was what was happening in the country as a result of the government’s rushed and reckless actions. What I read in the newspapers, and heard when talking to people, painted a thoroughly depressing picture.

At the end of the year, a report, compiled jointly with other research centres, was published by the Institute of Socio-Political Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Its main conclusion was: ‘The social and socio-political situation developing in the course of 1992 in Russia is nothing short of a slide towards social catastrophe.’

The report’s authors had to conclude that the radical reform policies of the past year had been a complete failure. ‘We have been unable to discern positive results or progress in any of the directions of the reforms.’ This had brought about an abrupt reduction in the number of people supporting the radical course. Society had moved rapidly from faith that the reforms would rapidly yield positive results to alienation and rejection of official policy. This swing in Russian public opinion resulted, the report said, from a catastrophic fall in the standard and quality of people’s lives.

A bacchanalia of disregard for the law and unprecedented destabilization of the economy, bringing about chaos, had led to a sharp rise in corruption and effectively an abdication of power to corrupt individuals and the mafia. From this, the report’s authors concluded: ‘A government that encourages corrupt elements of the state bureaucracy and black economy operators to seize and share out public property cannot expect to enjoy wide social support.’

Unsurprisingly, the deputies elected just two years previously by a direct vote in free elections reacted against what was taking place. In December 1992, the Seventh Congress of People’s Deputies of the Supreme Soviet of Russia sharply criticized both the way the economic shock policy had been conducted and its results. Speakers lambasted the government and First Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, who was in charge of economic policy. (The government was formally headed by Yeltsin.)

Gaidar had previously been one of the team working on plans for the Soviet economy’s transition to a market economy. He gave the impression of being a serious, knowledgeable, energetic person. I imagine that, if Perestroika had not been cut short, he would have found his place as an academic economist, and perhaps in managing the country’s economy. The disintegration of the Soviet Union meant, however, that his potential and that of his young team were exploited by Yeltsin’s group in pursuit of primarily political ends. By the time Gaidar joined the government, the country’s financial system had been wrecked (not without the connivance of that same Supreme Soviet that was now so highly critical of his record). The mistakes made by the reformers compounded the consequences of the collapse of economic ties between the former Soviet republics. Gaidar was very concerned about what was happening, but not in a position to change the overall policy or make serious adjustments to it.

Yeltsin was, of course, well aware that the deputies’ furious criticism was aimed less at Gaidar than at himself. His reaction was fully in character: he sulked and, from the podium, appealed over the heads of those assembled to the citizens of the country, declaring that the congress had turned into ‘a mass of total reactionariness’. The president refused to cooperate with the parliament, called for a national referendum of confidence and ostentatiously walked out.

In response, the congress refused by an overwhelming majority to extend the president’s emergency powers, but did, ultimately, accept his proposal to elect Viktor Chernomyrdin chairman of the government. Chernomyrdin had served as minister of the gas industry of the USSR and had subsequently headed Gazprom. It was also agreed to hold a referendum in April 1993 on the main provisions of a new constitution, including reallocation of powers between the legislative and executive bodies. Very soon, however, it became clear that this was only a temporary truce in a conflict between two parties, neither of which was inclined to collaborate with the other, to compromise, or to settle for anything less than unconditional victory at any price.

Unlike many, I did not consider the idea of a national referendum constructive or as contributing to stabilizing the situation and consolidating society. In fact, it struck me as positively counterproductive and dangerous. The purpose of the noisy referendum campaign was to divert society’s attention from the big question of why the course adopted in January 1992 had brought society to the verge of ruin. I made my opinion clear in an article in the weekly, Moskovskiye Novosti [Moscow News]. ‘Rather than bringing the supporters of reform closer together and extending democracy, the referendum will only deepen divisions and reinforce Russia’s centrifugal tendencies.’

The situation was now so acute that I felt compelled to express myself very directly. I described the government’s policy towards the people as blatantly cynical. ‘The inefficiency of the state bureaucracy and corruption have reached levels unprecedented in Russian history, and indeed in the modern world.’

In the same article, I expressed the opinion that ‘further expansion of the Russian president’s powers is fraught with the danger of fomenting an openly authoritarian regime’. I drew attention to ‘rumours that the president’s circle are thinking of declaring a “transitional period”, with emergency powers’. A situation might be created, I warned, which ‘could be used to justify a “temporary” reduction of free speech and other civil liberties, and suspension of representative bodies while a new constitution was developed and introduced’.

What needed to be done? In order to preserve civil peace, I advised the Congress of People’s Deputies to examine the work of the Supreme Soviet and executive arm and seek ways of restoring social harmony. ‘If that proves impossible, the only way to resolve the crisis constitutionally is to hold early elections of both branches of government, rather than waiting for a whole year.’

I also felt new elections were needed because the Russian institutions of government had been formed in the days of the USSR, when there was still a centre to the Soviet Union. ‘Many active and experienced Russian politicians were not eligible to participate in those elections because they were working in Union, rather than specifically Russian, institutions. Moreover, during the past two years new, fresh forces have come on the political scene in Russia that are capable of assuming responsibility for developing every sphere of life.’

The way events developed showed only too clearly how real these threats were. They were compounded by a continuing deterioration of the situation and increasing hardship in people’s lives. This made the conflict between the president and parliament all the more acute and irreconcilable. Serious accusations were hurled by both sides at the other. Yeltsin’s kitchen cabinet hinted he was on the verge of dissolving parliament. In response, the deputies denounced the ‘Kremlin’s court favourites’, and called for a campaign of civil disobedience and the establishment of a government of ‘national salvation’ to ‘restore order’. I followed what was happening with growing concern.

On the brink of crisis

Meanwhile, tensions in the country continued to increase. Rumours that the president was planning to declare a state of emergency and strip parliament of its functions proved only too correct. On 20 March, Yeltsin announced in a televised appeal to the citizens that he had signed a decree for an emergency system of government in the Russian Federation until the power struggle was resolved: ‘We cannot govern the country and manage its economy, particularly in a time of crisis, by votes, ripostes blurted into microphones, a parliamentary talking shop and endless meetings.’ The chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and the opposition saw the actions of President Boris Yeltsin as an attempted coup d’état. On behalf of the Constitutional Court, Chairman, Valeriy Zorkin declared the president’s statement and decree unconstitutional. Outside the Supreme Soviet’s headquarters, the ‘White House’, rallies of those supporting or opposed to the president alternated in the square. Society was split and there was a whiff of burning in the air.

At the request of Interfax, I expressed my opinion of Boris Yeltsin’s announcement, describing his decree on introducing presidential rule as a ‘serious political miscalculation’ that testified to the narrowness of his political power base and the extent of his suggestibility and reliance on the views of people who, as the saying goes, are ready to burn the house down in order to fry themselves an egg. The unconstitutional course of action chosen by the president, despite his promises to eschew force as a political resource, was, I said, ‘driving society towards confrontation and could upset the fragile state of peace in society and the state’.

I called on the executive and legislative branches of government to behave responsibly during this critical period of the country’s development:

In what happened subsequently, it seems to me today, what was crucial was less the details of the conflict or even the results of the referendum than the intentions of the parties to the conflict. Did they have the political courage to turn away from a senseless fight and settle down to building the essential institutions of democracy: a strong, responsible presidency; a parliament with extensive powers; an independent judiciary; political parties and the organizations that constitute civil society? Would they jointly find ways to implement difficult but essential economic reforms, while shielding people from their most painful consequences? That was the question.

On the eve of the referendum of 25 April 1993, I commented that, as formulated, it would not lead to a fundamental resolution of the crisis in the institutions of government or the country generally.

The referendum result was formally a victory for the president’s team. A majority voted ‘yes’ to the question of whether they had confidence in the president, and slightly more than half to the question of whether they approved of the government’s socio-economic policy. Taking account of the low turnout, this amounted to just over one-third of the electorate. As for the question of calling early elections, 49.5 per cent voted in favour of a new presidential election, and 67.2 per cent in favour of a new parliamentary election.

How should we interpret the result? In my opinion, the referendum result clearly reflected reluctance amongst a majority of people to return to the pre-Perestroika administrative-command past, which, presidential propaganda claimed, was the risk if supporters of the Congress won. ‘The referendum results’, I said, ‘do not allow us to recognize either side as the conclusive victor. Russian citizens are against confrontation: they want stability. They favour continuing the reforms, but with substantial modifications, primarily relief for those whom the reforms have put in special difficulties.’

What next? I had no doubt that a new constitution was needed, ‘but it would be unforgivable if it were the opportunistic fruit of the present political conflict. What matters most is that, after a draft has been agreed, the constitution should be adopted in an atmosphere of consent, within the framework of the constitutional process.’ The constitution should be adopted by a newly elected Supreme Soviet. Any coercion in adopting it would represent disrespect for the opinion of Russia’s citizens. ‘At all events,’ I stated at the end of May, ‘everything must be done in a lawful, legal manner. Only that can guarantee stable functioning of the Russian system of governance and safeguard the normal operation of Russian civil society, which is being born with so much travail.’

The Constitutional Convention established to put forward a draft new constitution was unable to do so. There was no substantive discussion at it, and in June I expressed my view that it had become a complete waste of time. I told reporters it was just ‘games that are not going to produce anything of value. We need politics, not political games.’

Summer 1993 was very busy for me, with several trips abroad, including to the Netherlands and Switzerland, where I worked on setting up the Green Cross International environmental organization. There was other charitable work too. On 7 June, Raisa and I were present at the opening of Russia’s largest and best-equipped department for bone marrow transplants at the National Children’s Hospital, with which she was constantly involved.

In 1990, Raisa became the patron of an international association, Haematologists of the World for Children, created specifically to provide modern treatment for the severest blood diseases in children. In March 1991, she donated a cheque for $100,000 to the Institute of Paediatric Haematology, which enabled doctors and nurses to be trained to use the latest medical technology and for them to work as interns at the most advanced haematology centres of the USA and Germany.

After December 1991, finance for building a specialized department for bone marrow transplant at the Institute of Paediatric Haematology was cut off. Resumption and completion of the building project was made possible when we succeeded in raising $1,000,000 for this specific purpose. Half was donated at my request by Fred Matser, a Dutch businessman and founder or co-founder of many charitable trusts, and the remainder was made up of fees I received for lectures during a trip to the United States in 1992. A further $1,000,000, needed to complete construction of the unit, was found after I made a number of appeals to the Russian government. Other foreign friends gave humanitarian and charitable aid to Russian organizations through the Gorbachev Foundation. On 24 August we delivered medical equipment to hospitals in the Stavropol region, purchased on the initiative of Maria Wilmes and a group of sponsors in Germany.

At that time I also finished work on Years of Difficult Decisions.[3] The book contained my talks and speeches, transcripts of interviews and negotiations in the period from 1985 to 1992. Much of the material was being published for the first time (in particular, the minutes of sharp exchanges in the Politburo on 24–25 March 1988 in connection with the publication of an article by Nina Andreyeva in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya).

We delivered the manuscript of my book almost simultaneously to Russian and French publishers, but the Russian publisher was prevented from bringing it out. It was made very clear that if he did, both the publisher and printer could expect a raid by the authorities. The set type of the book was broken up. It was secretly set again from scratch by a printer in Ryazan, but the upshot was that the book appeared in France before it appeared in Russia.

Meanwhile, the government crisis caused by the irreconcilable stand-off between the president and Supreme Soviet continued and threatened serious trouble. The underlying cause was, of course, the deteriorating situation in the country. At the Foundation we analysed it and our conclusions were dismaying:

I, however, remained convinced that only new elections offered any hope of ending the protracted deadlock. In an interview for Rossiyskaya Gazeta on 19 August 1993, I said: ‘If today’s politicians have the good of Russia at heart, they simply must hold elections this autumn. Russia is drifting rudderless.’ The way out of the crisis lay in renewing the federal government. It was essential to bring the country back from its present chaos, and ‘only new people will be capable of doing that. In addition, they will be credited a modest, but nevertheless valuable, degree of trust.’

Yeltsin had a different plan, and apparently by the end of the summer had firmly made up his mind to resolve the crisis by getting rid of parliament. The president devoted the whole of September to preparing to remove it by force. Accompanied by the ministers of defence and of the interior, he personally checked the preparedness of elite divisions deployed near Moscow and army units to obey his orders. He started appearing on television wearing military camouflage and a maroon beret, and holding a combat rifle.

On 21 September 1993, the president of Russia signed Decree No. 1400 annulling the powers of the Congress of People’s Deputies and of the Supreme Soviet. The president ‘recommended’ to the Constitutional Court that it should suspend its sittings until the election of a new legislative body, the Federal Assembly, scheduled for 12 December. This fatal decision initiated a chain of events that largely determined the departures from a democratic path of development that we have witnessed over the following years and up to the present day.

That same day, the Constitutional Court ruled that the actions and decisions of the president relating to his decree of 21 September were not in accordance with the constitution of the Russian Federation. They were grounds for removing President B. N. Yeltsin from office or inaugurating special procedures to hold him to account in accordance with the constitution of the Russian Federation.

On 22 September, the Supreme Soviet passed a resolution stating that ‘the president of the Russian Federation has instigated a coup d’état’. The same day it resolved to amend the Criminal Code with an article making actions against the constitution punishable by penalties up to and including death with confiscation of property. Yeltsin saw this as a threat aimed at him personally.

The two sides truly deserved each other! I have no doubt that, right up to the last minute before the bloody showdown on 3–4 October, there was some possibility the crisis could have been peacefully resolved. I had no leverage with the parties directly, but tried to moderate their behaviour by speaking out publicly and calling for common sense.

At a press conference in Moscow on 25 September, I stated: ‘The best way out of the situation that has developed in Russia is simultaneous early elections for the presidency and parliament, and the sooner the better.’ It was essential to return to constitutional politics, since otherwise a very dangerous precedent would be set. ‘This kind of treatment of the constitution, wiping your feet on it, is Bolshevism.’ Another important point I stressed at the press conference was that, if only one source of government power were to be left and have total control of the media, there would be no possibility of conducting free elections to the parliament.

The root of all this evil was the failure of the policy pursued by the Russian government, both the president and the parliament, since the end of 1991. ‘They are each as bad as the other, and are mired in this situation. They must go,’ I said. I advised Yeltsin to immediately return the situation to where it was before 21 September. Needless to say, all the latest resolutions of the Supreme Soviet also needed to be revoked.

I thought the stance of the leaders of the West, with their unconditional support for Yeltsin, was dangerous, and supposed they did not understand the situation. The most important thing Boris Yeltsin could do, I said, was ‘behave not like the protagonist of a particular political faction but as a national leader’. I believe that was his last chance. He did not take it.

On 29 September, Alexiy II, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, appealed to the parties to the conflict not to resort to bloodshed. The church joined the search for a compromise solution. A majority of the members of the Supreme Soviet, meeting in a building surrounded, on the president’s orders, by a cordon of troops, were prepared to compromise. Several regional leaders and presidents of republics within the Russian Federation tried to mediate between the Supreme Soviet, the Presidential Administration and the government of Viktor Chernomyrdin. Even those in favour of the presidential decree of 21 September inclined to a compromise solution close to what I had proposed.

On the afternoon of 3 October, however, the situation in Moscow deteriorated. Groups of demonstrators, gunmen and manifest agents provocateurs, led by General Albert Makashov and Viktor Anpilov, broke through the cordon surrounding the White House, seized the Mayor’s Office on Novy Arbat and headed for the Ostankino Television Centre.

That evening, Boris Yeltsin declared a state of emergency in Moscow. Shooting broke out at the Television Centre and resulted in deaths and injuries. Dozens of people were killed, including several journalists. Unquestionably, the situation had to be brought under control, and by the morning of 4 October that had been done. I have no doubt that at that point too the crisis could have been ended without further bloodshed, but just then, at 10:00 am, tanks were brought up to the bridge in front of the White House and opened fire on the building! In effect, a brief civil war had been unleashed in the centre of Moscow, which resulted in the death, according to official statistics, of 160 people.

There were about 1,000 people in the parliament building at this time: deputies, members of staff, service personnel, journalists, women and children. The building caught fire. Tongues of flame and black smoke engulfed it window by window and storey by storey. This appalling picture was being shown live on the screens of millions of television sets in Russia and around world. CNN cameras were broadcasting live from several points in blocks adjacent to the Supreme Soviet building.

‘What infamy!’ I thought, as I watched it on television. At 14:30 people began emerging from the parliament with a white flag. Rutskoy, Khasbulatov and Makashov were arrested. Yeltsin, in a televised address, announced the suppression in Moscow of an ‘armed fascistcommunist rebellion’.

My reaction to those events, my initial assessment and conclusions are most fully set out in an interview I gave two or three days after the event to Komsomolskaya Pravda’s correspondent, Alexander Gamov:

A state of emergency is not the way to stability

In the days immediately after the blood-soaked showdown, Russia was aghast and seemed traumatized by what had happened. It was important to deny the president any sense of the euphoria of victory. To consider what had happened a ‘victory over a communist-fascist rebellion’ was a dangerous delusion, a mere propaganda myth. Certainly, some pernicious individuals had been involved in the events, including extremist groups of provocateurs. There had, however, also been people sincerely protesting against the violation of the rights and powers of parliament and demanding a return to the rule of law. And how many entirely innocent people were victims! After the shelling of parliament, the government instigated mass beatings of citizens in the approaches to the White House. Even technical college students who had rushed to the Krasnaya Presnya area out of youthful curiosity were attacked, some of them fatally. The mother of one of these murdered lads, deprived of her sole source of income, came to ask our Foundation for support. We helped as best we could.

I was astonished and disturbed by a letter signed by well-known writers supporting the bombardment of parliament. The title of their letter, published in Izvestiya, read: ‘Writers call on the government to take decisive action.’ It went on: ‘Enough of talking! It is time to learn how to act. These thick misfits respect only power.’ How could Academician Dmitry Likhachev sign such a letter? Why had this crude, vulgar phi-lippic been signed by Bella Akhmadulina, Viktor Astafiev and other major writers? These questions gave me no rest. Many of these people are no longer with us, but those who still are can hardly be proud of what they did.

Not all our cultural figureheads adopted such a shameful position, of course. Andrey Sinyavsky, Vladimir Maximov and Petr Yegides published an impassioned article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta in which they condemned the slaughter in the centre of Moscow. Perhaps the best response to those demanding the ‘vipers’ should be crushed was the poem by Andrey Voznesensky:

Introducing the saga of the ‘state of emergency’, Yeltsin promised it would lead to stability, pave the way for democracy and facilitate the progress of reform. It very soon became clear that it was having precisely the opposite effect. I wrote an article about this at the request of Italy’s La Stampa:

One result of those events was the dropping of criminal proceedings against the organizers of the August 1991 coup. The next State Duma, elected in December 1993, voted to scrap the investigation into the massive loss of life in October, simultaneously announcing a political and economic amnesty which extended to the members of the State Emergency Committee. It was a deal of mutual absolution of responsibility of those who shelled the parliament, those who provoked widespread disorder and those guilty of the coup d’état in August 1991. There was a certain logic to this: one lot of coup conspirators (of 1993) amnestied another lot (from 1991). It was all done, as it soon became fashionable to say in semi-criminal jargon, ‘with a nod and a wink’.

On 12 December, elections were held for seats in the State Duma, the Russian parliament having had its historical name returned to it. The president and his supporters were confident that the vote would bring the pro-government Russia’s Choice Party to power, the first of a succession of pro-government ‘parties’. They were in for a rude awakening. The October bloodbath in Moscow sharply reduced the numbers supporting the president and increased the protest vote. The Russian people returned a shock verdict on those who had perpetrated shock therapy on them and the shock of October. They voted in unprecedented numbers for Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s ‘Liberal Democratic’ Party with its extremist slogans. The LDP was well ahead of Russia’s Choice and all the other parties.

The overnight telethon organized at the Ostankino Television Centre on 12 December, which was supposed to celebrate the expected victory of the radical democrats, was taken off air shortly after 3:00 am, ostensibly for ‘technical reasons’. The real reason was the patently obvious and humiliating defeat suffered by Russia’s Choice, which did not bear out the expectations of jubilation of the show’s organizers. In my article, ‘The election results: what now?’, I gave my reading of the situation:

On New Year’s Eve 1993, I pondered a great deal over what had come about in the year that was ending. My thoughts were mostly apprehensive and gloomy, as I told the correspondent of Rabochaya Tribuna [Workers’ Tribune], V. Kovalev:

Defects of the new constitution

I thought a good deal about the newly adopted constitution, discussed it with colleagues, and came to the conclusion that it needed more work.

Even in the fairly well-drafted section on rights and freedoms there were obvious weaknesses. Without an effective mechanism of guarantee, the principle of direct entitlement to rights and freedoms was likely to remain no more than fine words. A careful reading of certain articles suggested that, unless changes were made, we could probably say goodbye to free education and health provision. There was a lack of much-needed clarity.

Other sections, especially those dealing with the relationship between the branches of government, were in need of even greater revision. There was a disproportionate expansion of the powers of the president, together with substantial cutting back of the powers of parliament. In addition, the powers of the president were spelled out in far greater detail than those of the other branches. The legal procedure for holding him to account was so extraordinarily complex as to make it all but impossible.

I thought it very unhelpful to the president to have such an insignificant parliament; it only devalued the gains already made by democracy. A major politician needs strong democratic institutions to safeguard his policies against miscalculation. In their absence, no amount of talk about democracy will prevent its destruction.

Regrettably, my concerns proved only too justified. The new constitution, which started being referred to as the Yeltsin Constitution, was increasingly used to justify and legitimate the president’s personal power, with all the inevitable accompanying ills: impunity and unaccountability of his close circle and insiders; arbitrary misconduct towards ‘the rest’; underhand intrigues by Yeltsin’s ‘courtiers’; and so on.

Those drafting the constitution were distinguished specialists in constitutional law. Today it seems extraordinary that they ‘overlooked’ some of its peculiarities, like the only too well-known provision that the president cannot serve more than two terms in succession but, if he just takes a break, there is no problem! It seems entirely possible that Yeltsin was envisaging just such a possibility, although his age and state of health made it unlikely he would be able to take advantage of it himself. That was done instead, as we know, by Vladimir Putin.

The constitution’s major flaw, however, was its ‘super-presidential’ character. In combination with our monarchist tradition and the deferential attitude to higher authority typical of the Russian national character, this presented a real risk of creating an autocratic regime. Some of the scholars involved in drafting the constitution – for example, Viktor Sheynis – hoped that, over time, the imbalance of power in favour of the executive arm would be adjusted through expansion of the monitoring functions of the parliament, but this, needless to say, did not happen. With every year that passed the tendency became more apparent for the democratic potential of the new constitution to be given only limited implementation, while its authoritarian potential was realized to the full.

I spent the first months of 1994 completing the writing of Life and Reforms, published in English as Memoirs.[1] Two years was not long to complete memoirs covering the whole of my life and, most importantly, the years of Perestroika. It was important to ensure as high a degree of accuracy as possible when relating the course of events, to verify assessments and critically rethink what was done. That was important not only for the reader, but also for me. I have often returned to this book since, rereading it, and I believe it will remain an important source for historians and anyone wishing to understand that period.

Like millions of Russians, I could not help wondering what lay ahead for the country after the painful tragedy of October 1993. Would we ever find the road to social harmony? If the president and government set their sights on restoring social consensus and implementing reform on that basis, many past mistakes could yet be put right and much guilt redeemed. I decided to adopt that attitude also to the State Duma’s decision to amnesty all those involved in the coup and the shelling of the parliament.

I had a low opinion of this ‘mutual forgiveness’ of people who had repeatedly broken the law and bore joint responsibility for the predicament in which the country found itself. I had always advocated seeing the trial of the members of the State Emergency Committee through to the end in order to establish all the facts and determine the degree of guilt. Otherwise, I warned, we would learn nothing from the events of August 1991. As I said in an interview for Interfax:

Subsequent events showed that the amnesty was not a step along the road to reconciliation and harmony. The abandoning of the case against the State Emergency Committee was seen by the defendants as a victory and an opportunity to put about their latest version of events, to whitewash themselves and denigrate Gorbachev. Neither did the Russian government get round to doing what would genuinely have facilitated social harmony. There was no change in their behaviour or how they arrived at decisions.

In January 1994, Yegor Gaidar left the government, turning down an offer of the post of first deputy prime minister. In a letter to the president, he wrote: ‘I cannot be simultaneously in the government and in opposition to it.’ I do not think that was the only reason for his departure. Gaidar had been proposing an acceleration of the pace of reform, but how can you accelerate a process that has already produced only dire results? In an article published in Izvestiya, Gaidar himself wrote of the ‘failure of democratic government’. ‘The country is in a state of profound crisis… there is no great national ideal, whether realistic or even utopian… There are no major goals, discipline has weakened, the situation is unstable, and opportunities for self-enrichment are immense.’ However, his article was devoted to claiming that the only people not to blame for everything were the perpetrators of shock therapy reform.

In an interview for Interfax, I expressed the opinion that the departure of Yegor Gaidar – and even possibly of other ‘figureheads of shock therapy’ – would change nothing, because the government had no clear strategy. ‘Still, nobody heading the government is thinking about what to do next or how to move the country forward, so we are doomed to political and economic drift with all its consequences.’ If those running the country ‘do not take the pulse of life, we can be certain that Russia must expect more political antics that may have serious social consequences’, I said. I made it clear that I was not advocating a return to the old system:

Economists advise, but the government is not listening

In February we convened a conference of major economists at the Gorbachev Foundation to discuss the economic situation and try to find a way out of the impasse in which the ‘victorious’ government found itself.

We wanted to hear the views of economists of different persuasions, from those who on the whole supported the president and government’s economic policy, to those who were critical of it. Participants included Academicians Leonid Abalkin and Nikolai Petrakov; corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Science Vadim Medvedev and Vladlen Martynov; four doctors of science: Sergey Glaziev (Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy), Alexander Livshits (Analytical Centre of the President of Russia), Yevgeny Yasin and Andrey Illarionov; and other prominent academic economists and also journalists.

In my opening remarks, I urged the participants to engage in constructive dialogue:

Participants in the discussion, despite all the differences in how they assessed the causes and nature of Russia’s profound economic crisis, did their best to present their view of how it could be resolved. Acutely critical assessments predominated. Thus, Sergey Glaziev, a former minister in Gaidar’s government who resigned after the shelling of parliament, said: ‘From my viewpoint, the economy has entered a catastrophically destructive phase, and what is being destroyed is the very industrial sectors we had hoped would spearhead structural change and have the potential for future growth. The deindustrialization we have been hearing about for the past two years is accelerating.’ He described the way privatization had been carried out as the most inefficient of all the alternatives, and forecast continuing recession ‘until such time as we see the emergence of effective property owners.’

Leonid Abalkin put it even more bluntly:

Andrey Illarionov criticized the ‘reformers’ from a different perspective: ‘As I see it, we are currently faced with a government entirely lacking any ideological underpinning or realistic plan of action.’ He saw inflation as the top priority: ‘It is immaterial which government is in power, what its policies are, or what speechifying accompanies them: while monthly inflation is hovering around the 20–25 per cent mark, it stands no chance of remaining in office. No government in world history has been able to.’

In respect of savings, Yevgeny Yasin said: ‘I believed from the outset that Gaidar was mistaken in refusing to do anything for savings. Simply to index them would have been unaffordable, but other solutions needed to be looked at, for example, indexing the savings of people of pensionable age. Although even that would have been costly.’

What of the future? Opinions were divided. Alexander Livshits did not anticipate catastrophe: ‘Russia is not doomed. It is all just going to cost us a lot and last for a very long time. The knock-on political effects that have been mentioned, the threat of dictatorship and so on, do not seem so self-evident to me.’ The majority of the discussants, however, agreed with Academician Abalkin’s view: ‘The reform and democracy can be saved, but only if there is a radical change of course.’

I spoke twice in the course of the debate. I said:

Summarizing the debate, I said:

I got just one thing wrong, and that was when I said, ‘This conference has brought together very influential people.’ Unfortunately, neither the president nor the government were interested in paying heed to the advice of independent experts. They brushed their views aside and instead carried on ‘firefighting’ emergencies as they arose. It was particularly clear they had an allergy to the viewpoint of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which, incidentally, was to be inherited in the years that followed by many in Putin’s ruling circle. That approach leads to micromanagement and, in reality, to drift rather than thought-through, long-term policies. We seem incapable of freeing ourselves of this. I believe it is one of the great failures of our protracted transition.

Nikita Khrushchev: lessons in courage and lessons from mistakes

I am not a great enthusiast for dates and anniversaries, but one date in 1994 brought to mind someone whose life and experiences had long fascinated me, encouraging me to reflect on continuities and, although they are said always to be misleading, historical parallels. The centenary of the birth of Nikita Khrushchev was approaching.

We decided to organize a conference at the Foundation on the life of this outstanding man. I offered my thoughts about him in an article titled, ‘Nikita Khrushchev: lessons in courage and lessons from mistakes’. I wrote that I identified with Khrushchev’s fraught experiences.

Our academic Khrushchev conference was not mere ceremony but a lively, impassioned exchange of views between people, all of whom had their own understanding of this exceptional individual. The participants included, amongst others, Academician Alexander Nikonov, director of the Agrarian Institute; Khrushchev’s son, Sergey; the writer Viktor Rozov; Ambassador Oleg Troyanovsky; historian Roy Medvedev; playwright Mikhail Shatrov; historian Zoya Serebryakova; Khrushchev’s American biographer Bill Taubman; Academician Dzhermen Gvishiani; Professor Vadim Zagladin; journalist Nina Khrushcheva, Nikita Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter; corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Science and my assistant, Georgiy Shakhnazarov.

Opening the conference, I said we wanted to pay tribute to a courageous politician who had dealt the first blow to the ideology of Stalinism and the totalitarian system. Second, this was an, admittedly belated, opportunity for a serious examination of Nikita Khrushchev’s efforts at reform and a frank discussion of the lessons that could be learned from them in the present day.

I shared my reflections and assessments with those attending the conference and think they remain of interest:

The formidable attack Khrushchev launched on totalitarianism was choked off and followed by a period of reaction that was little more than titivated neo-Stalinism. The rest of the world embarked on major structural changes while Russia stagnated and fell decades behind. This is what we need to remember: ‘It is not so much for Khrushchev’s benefit as for ourselves, for Russia, for the world, that we need to go back to the experience of previous reform initiatives and learn from them.’

The Union could have been saved

Another important project was what the Foundation described as a ‘White Paper’ titled The Union Could Have Been Saved.[2] A white paper consists mainly of documents that speak for themselves. Many were previously unpublished, including records of the negotiations for a new Union Treaty in Novo-Ogarevo and Politburo meetings. Others had been published for limited circulation and now, with hindsight, read differently.

A book launch and press conference were held at the Foundation. Of course, I told the journalists, you cannot turn back the pages of history. Opportunities which had existed in the past were no longer an option. Replying to a question, I said:

The economy: what now?

In the first half of 1994, the government decided to make combating inflation its top priority, and once again tried to solve the problem with a cavalry charge, as if it were an end in itself and, moreover, something that could be over in next to no time. Once again, the result was lamentable, the medicine almost deadlier than the disease.

My colleague, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences Vadim Medvedev, wrote in one of his research reports to me as president of the Foundation:

Meetings in the regions

In 1994, I travelled to St Petersburg, Krasnoyarsk, Vladimir, Ufa and Novgorod. I wanted to talk to people and get a sense of their mood and reactions to what was going on in the country, and also of their attitude towards me.

I went to St Petersburg at the invitation of cultural figures and business circles there, and also of the mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, and the head of the administration of Kronstadt, Viktor Surikov.

Surprisingly, contrary to the agreed programme, Sobchak was absent from our meetings. We heard later that this had been because of direct pressure from Yeltsin. The Petersburg authorities’ arrangements for the visit were coordinated by the city’s deputy mayor, Vladimir Putin. He met us at Pulkovo Airport, accompanied us throughout our stay in St Petersburg, was attentive and considerate, and showed he was knowledgeable about the city’s problems and much else besides. We enjoyed the company of Lyudmila Putina, who showed Raisa the work of the city’s schoolchildren.

We spent an evening at the Actors Club of the Union of Theatre Workers, where we met such outstanding Petersburg actors as Vladislav Strzhelchik, Kirill Lavrov, Andrey Tolubeyev and others prominent in the arts.

I remember Andrey Tolubeyev took me aside at one reception and said very quietly: ‘Mikhail Sergeyevich, if you should need a place of refuge, I will hide you in my dacha in the forest. The Devil himself would never find you there. You can rely on me.’ I laughed, although I believe the offer was meant seriously. I said I was touched by his concern, but had no intention of hiding anywhere.

Raisa and I went to see Maxim Gorky’s Posledniye [The Last Ones] at the Bolshoi Drama Theatre.

In meetings with some of the city’s young entrepreneurs I heard of the extraordinary difficulties they had to overcome for their businesses to survive.

A small group of protesters tried to disrupt my meeting with students at St Petersburg State University. The students had come to listen to Gorbachev and gave them no support. As always when I have meetings with young people, we got on well and I left to warm applause. Incidentally, I noticed one of the girls who had been protesting clapping loudly. She had stayed, listening carefully, right to the end.

I had the rare opportunity of a live television interview on Petersburg-Channel 5, and enjoyed a meaningful conversation with the editors of the St Petersburg press. I was left with a good overall impression. Although initially rather taken aback by Sobchak’s ‘disappearance’, I left St Petersburg in a positive mood.

In the summer, Raisa and I undertook a visit to Siberia, to the banks of the Yenisey. Viktor Astafiev invited us to his 70th birthday party. He was an important writer, a real, modern Russian classic, and although I did not see eye to eye with him (he could sometimes be over the top in his loves and hates), it would have been churlish not to accept the invitation. For the anniversary, our Foundation supported publication of Russkii Almaz [Russian Diamonds], a collection of his short stories.[3] Our meeting was very cordial.

I visited the city of Vladimir at the invitation of its young governor, Yury Vlasov, and remember completely informal meetings in the streets with local people. Some who came over seemed not entirely sure this really was Gorbachev. A clone perhaps, or just someone with a strong resemblance? But then I was bombarded with all sorts of questions: ‘How are you getting on now, after the Kremlin?’ ‘Where do you live?’ Somebody had been busily dunning into people’s heads that Gorbachev had emigrated and was now living in Germany, or perhaps America. ‘What is going on now, is that what you did Perestroika for?’ And again, ‘What do you think about the fighting in Chechnya?’

I met people working in local authorities, who had come from every district of the province to Vladimir for our discussion. By the Cathedrals of the Assumption and St Dmitry, the major architectural monuments of this millennial Russian city, I spoke to parishioners and tourists. In the cathedral, quite unexpectedly, a young priest came out to me and the church choir burst into chanting ‘O Lord, preserve him, unto many years of life’. They wished me good health and asked after Raisa.

The human warmth of our reception gladdened us, and confuted all the talk about virtually everyone in Russia hating Gorbachev, but I still had a sense of uneasiness.

My travels around the country, meetings, discussions in factories, informal contacts with a great variety of people, young and not-soyoung, long-serving workers, owners of small, medium and large businesses led me to the conclusion that people were increasingly losing faith in democratic reform and beginning to pin their hopes on a new ‘firm hand’. This prompted me to send an open letter on 26 October 1994 to the media:

Overwhelmingly, the media were deaf to my appeal, my concerns and proposals. Izvestiya’s political commentator, Otto Latsis, only mentioned it in passing, adding that there was nothing new in Gorbachev’s appeal. The government’s Rossiyskaya Gazeta, quoting just a few fragmentary sentences from the letter, accused me of inciting confrontation with the intention of forming an anti-Yeltsin alliance. There was not a word about the substance of the appeal, the need for free and fair elections. Almost two decades would have to pass before young, concerned people would appear in Russia prepared to actively join the fight for fair elections.

Chechnya: a war that could have been avoided

The last months and days of 1994 have gone down in modern Russian history as the beginning of a protracted, bloody war in Chechnya and Russia.

The pre-history of the war is a whole succession of rash decisions and irresponsible stunts. It all started with the ‘Parade of Sovereignties’, provoked by Yeltsin in his power struggle with the Soviet Union’s central administration. The would-be coup of the ‘State Emergency Committee’ in 1991 precipitated a serious crisis for the government in Checheno-Ingushetia.

I knew this republic well. They were our neighbouring republic in Stavropol where I lived and worked for many years, and I was fully aware of the many acute sensitivities that had built up there. This whole region requires a supremely cautious and meticulously gauged approach. Shoot-from-the-hip politicking in that part of the world is asking for trouble. Unfortunately, political bungling was precisely what was on offer from the people surrounding the Russian president when they decided to back General Djohar Dudaev, inveigling him into the forcible removal of the Supreme Soviet of the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Republic under its then leader, Doku Zavgaev. Dudaev found himself with a large quantity of arms at his disposal, left behind by the federal Russian forces who were withdrawn from the republic by the Russian Ministry of Defence. Had it not been for the 1991 coup and disintegration of the Soviet Union, nothing of that sort would have happened.

Dudaev consolidated his position, using the watchwords of sovereignty and independence for the Chechen people, in whom the appalling memory was still very much alive of their deportation under Stalin in 1944. The decline of the economy, growth of criminality, nationalist euphoria and sheer hatred hit the republic exceptionally hard and forced almost one-quarter of the population (nearly all of them Russian) to leave. Opposition to Dudaev’s government continued as it became increasingly entangled with mafia networks. For three years the federal government failed to regain political influence and control in Chechnya and the situation became increasingly intractable. The president of Russia decided to resolve the problem by force.

People in the know told me Yeltsin hesitated long and hard over whether or not to negotiate with Dudaev, and seemed inclined to do so until someone managed to inform him ‘just in time’ about some very unflattering remark Dudaev had supposedly made about the Russian president. Yeltsin rejected a proposal for negotiations and decided the time had come to show his decisiveness and willpower by resorting to the armed forces. ‘The president needed a small, victorious war to improve his approval rating’: these are the words of a member of Yeltsin’s immediate entourage at that time. In other words, he wanted to demonstrate the government’s effectiveness and intimidate opposition. Also, of course, to show Europe and the West how tough he was.

On 29 November 1994, Yeltsin issued an ultimatum to the Chechen leaders giving them 48 hours to cease fire and dissolve all illegal armed groups or face the declaration of a state of emergency in the republic. I could only support the call to end bloodshed, but everything else in the document was a gamble on the introduction of a state of emergency and force. This would involve all the accoutrements of a state of emergency: troops, tanks, aircraft, paratroopers, etc. I believed that was the wrong approach.

Reaction of the Russian public to Yeltsin’s gamble on a military solution was negative. The press condemned it. The Duma issued a statement calling for a return to seeking a peaceful settlement, and even decided later to set up a commission of enquiry into all the circumstances of the Chechen crisis. The Council of the Federation opposed the use of troops and military operations. Every opinion poll in Moscow and throughout Russia showed 65–75 per cent of citizens to be against deploying the military. The executive, however, demonstrated its authoritarianism by ignoring public opinion.

From the outset I saw great danger in the course the president had adopted, but nevertheless offered to act as a mediator if either of the parties to the conflict so wished. At a press conference in the Foundation on 29 November, I said:

Dudaev phoned me and said he agreed that I should mediate. I have no wish to idealize Dudaev, but he said at that time: ‘We do not envisage our future without Russia. We must live together with Russia.’ He did not say exactly how, but that would have been the subject of negotiation. Here was the key to conducting a dialogue and seeking ways for us to coexist. That approach, however, proved unacceptable to Yeltsin.

On 30 November, the president signed Decree No. 2137c, ‘Disarmament of armed gangs in the Chechen Republic’, which initiated large-scale military operations by Russian federal forces. On 11 December a decree was signed on ‘restoration of constitutional legality’ in the country. Troops of the Ministry of Defence and the Interior Ministry were sent into Chechnya, and the subsequent course of events is well known.

On New Year’s Eve 1994, dozens of Russian soldiers died in the course of a failed assault on Grozny. Their bodies lay unburied in the city’s streets. On 4 January I called for the convening of an extraordinary joint session of both houses of the Federal Assembly, mandating the appearance of the president. I stated that the war in Chechnya had assumed the status of a national crisis. I called for an end to the bloodshed and the conducting of genuine negotiations, with the real players rather than inventing a puppet government in Moscow and trying to export it there, which I warned would not work. The juggernaut of war was on the move, however, and war has a logic of its own.

For what took place in Chechnya the guilt lies not with the army, the soldiers and military staff, but with the politicians and military strategists. The conduct of our soldiers began, however, to be motivated by revenge. That is understandable: when they saw their comrades being killed, when they themselves had been abandoned, when unburied corpses littered the streets, the motive of revenge developed and grew.

Exactly the same was true on the Chechen side. What are people supposed to feel who have lost their family, their father, mother, children, their home? When everything has been destroyed that had been built up over so many years? It was understandable that they too would take revenge. The longer all this continued, the harder it was to find a way out of the crisis.

The war dragged on, and in February 1996 I made a public statement proposing a plan of action for a political settlement of the conflict.

Only after one and a half years of futile attempts to resolve the problem by force did the Russian government announce some supposed ‘peace plan’, promising to ‘conclude peacefully in Chechnya’. The presidential election was approaching and the government finally decided to negotiate with the Chechen side. A ceasefire agreement was signed.

Military operations continued, however, only in a different form. After the presidential election, the situation of the federal forces in Chechnya continued to worsen. General Alexander Lebed, appointed secretary of the Russian Security Council by Yeltsin, was delegated to conduct new negotiations. Lebed managed to reach agreement, but at the price of effectively conceding the federal government’s defeat.

This was a defeat not for Russia, but for the Yeltsin regime. Its earlier call to ‘take as much sovereignty as you can eat’, the destruction of the Soviet Union and the shelling of parliament were all steps along a road leading to the war in Chechnya. Everything that followed was a consequence of ill-conceived, reckless policies, resorting to force, and a reluctance to recognize new realities and seek a political solution when it was possible.

In an interview, I told Moskovskiye Novosti that the events around Chechnya demonstrated the kind of regime we were dealing with in Russia: ‘I cannot call it democratic.’ The government had run out of energy in both its domestic and foreign policy and that is why it turned to authoritarianism. These events once again showed up serious flaws in the current constitution, which effectively placed the presidency beyond the control of the legislative branch and society.

Yeltsin authorized the Khasavyurt agreement, but it did not settle the conflict; rather, it was a truce which would inevitably lead to a new military confrontation.

The year 1994 is remembered in history only for a succession of decisions that pushed Russia further towards impasse and saw the Yeltsin government lose whatever authority it still commanded. Life for ordinary citizens worsened relentlessly. Suffice it to say that this was a record year for Russia in terms of ‘abnormally high mortality’ of men of working age (between sixteen and sixty). In terms of negative demographic indicators, and also in the suicide rate, Russia far surpassed all European countries.

The intelligentsia

In 1995 came the tenth anniversary of Perestroika, but the mood during the first days and weeks of the year was far from celebratory. That made it all the more important to continue analysing the lessons learned during Perestroika and applying them to the new challenges and worries.

A round-table discussion at the Gorbachev Foundation debated one of our most difficult topics: the role of the intelligentsia in Perestroika. It brought together people with different beliefs and of different political persuasions: Academicians Nikita Moiseyev, Vitaliy Goldansky and Boris Raushenbakh; the playwrights Viktor Rozov and Mikhail Shatrov; the film directors Stanislav Govorukhin and Nikita Mikhalkov; actor Anatoly Romashin; journalist Lyudmila Saraskina and philosophers Valentin Tolstykh and Vadim Mezhuyev.

I have had plenty of experience of interaction with the intelligentsia, in public and in private, in wider circles and more exclusively. During Perestroika the intelligentsia was sometimes lavish in its praise, but sometimes turned its back on me and was harshly critical. I was ready for that. Throughout history, reformers have found themselves in the position of being accorded sporadic support, almost worshipped, only then to be vilified. Nevertheless, the intellectuals have the capacity to interpret events and public opinion as they develop. When they have understood what is really happening, they can steadfastly support reformers and help society to understand what is being done and why.

At the round table, I recalled how academics (with few exceptions), writers and media commentators launched a vociferous campaign against our government’s intention to raise the price of bread by three kopecks. Nowadays, people would just laugh at that, but back then it was no laughing matter for us. Academicians, doctors of science and journalists anathematized our plans and us personally. Later, those same people were accusing Gorbachev of indecisiveness.

I could have reeled off a long list of instances when the intelligentsia declared Gorbachev was heading in the wrong direction or doing things the wrong way, but serious political action is not based on instant advice. It can take a long time before it becomes clear who has done what, and which route is the most direct. For example, the intelligentsia was largely in favour of the shock therapy begun in January 1992, with dire consequences.

I said I would not like to see us denouncing or blaming the intelligentsia. I considered it unhelpful and even dangerous at the time and still think so today. Society cannot exist without intellectuals, cannot express itself, understand and explain its past and present, or generate guidelines for the future. The intelligentsia are the yeast of a nation, without which the bread is flat. They are the elite seeds needed to grow a good crop. That is why, as we embarked on Perestroika, we were very much counting on the intelligentsia.

There are many conundrums to which no government, including a reforming administration, can find the answer without the support and help of the intelligentsia. By that, I do not mean only the metropolitan intelligentsia, but everybody who works in education, science, medicine, the media and the arts. We are talking about millions of people who are a priceless social asset.

The intelligentsia have a special responsibility for Russia’s future, a contribution to make to her renewal and the continuation of democratic reform. Democracy, freedom and culture are what matter most to the intelligentsia, and it is for the intelligentsia to defend them.

Government and society

With the agreement of the chairman of the Duma Committee on Legislation and Judicial and Legal Reform, I forwarded my views to the Duma on a draft law on ‘Election of the president of the Russian Federation’. I proposed:

Among other proposals, I included an amendment laying out clear conditions and procedure for early elections of the president of the Russian Federation, as well as measures to strengthen guarantees of the democratic nature of the presidential election and scrutiny by voters of how it was conducted and the vote counted. In other words, I demanded guarantees of fair and free elections.

It was impossible to remain silent in those tense months of 1995. I talked a lot to journalists and visited the Russian provinces. Planned trips to Novosibirsk in February and to St Petersburg in May gave commentators grounds to suggest I might be thinking of standing in the presidential election the following year. I decided to take the opportunity to assess the state of society and see how receptive people were towards my ideas.

In Novosibirsk I visited Akademgorodok and met scientists. I met workers at the Stankosib factory, university students and businessmen. I found that everywhere people were very engaged. They bombarded me with questions about topics that were clearly of great concern, and totally dispelled the myth that they had no interest in politics.

I also spent four extremely busy days in St Petersburg. A conference was held at the Mariinsky Palace to mark the tenth anniversary of the beginning of Perestroika. I talked about Perestroika to workers at the Baltika factory, to academics and writers at Kshesinskaya’s Palace, and to teachers and students at St Petersburg Pedagogical University. Everywhere the same question came up in one form or another: ‘How do you see the future of Russia. How do current policies measure up to your ideas? Are they a logical continuation of what was begun in 1985?’ My reply was:

I had a turbulent exchange of views in Kursk at the Khimvolokno synthetic fibre factory. The workers and their families there were in severe difficulties because of a sharp cutback in production. Their salaries were going unpaid for months. At first, for several minutes, I was simply prevented from speaking by hundreds of agitated people who were despairing of getting any justice, including many women with children. I waited for a time, then came down from the platform and took a few steps across to the front rows. I asked them, ‘Have you come here to make a noise or to talk? If you just want to make a noise, then perhaps it is already time to finish. If you want to hear what I have to say, do please listen!’ The hall quietened down and we were able to start a conversation. I made no excuses, and myself asked the audience some hard questions. Our discussion lasted almost two hours and they applauded at the end.

In Chuvashia I was scheduled to visit the university and have a meeting with the lecturers and students. It was moved to the local concert hall because ‘Moscow advised against’ politicians speaking in colleges and universities. As a result, the hall was jammed full of people, standing in the aisles, up by the stage. An attempt by a small group to disrupt my speech was put down by members of the audience themselves. The stream of questions made it seem our conversation would never end. There were hostile questions too, which I answered frankly.

In the evening I had dinner with Nikolai Fedorov, the president of Chuvashia. Three years previously, as minister of justice, he had threatened to have me brought in handcuffs to Zorkin in the Constitutional Court. He seemed to have mellowed.

My main preoccupation in those months was how to save Russia from sliding into authoritarianism. There were increasingly persistent rumours that the government was looking for a way to avoid elections. In October 1995, I stated that postponing the elections would be tantamount to usurping the people’s right to take decisions about their own future. If allowed, it would put an end to democracy in Russia and to her future as a civilized state. The parliamentary elections went ahead in December, evidently in order to test the temperature, assess the balance of power, and then decide what to do about the presidential elections.

The elections brought defeat for the government. The Our Home is Russia Party received just 10 per cent of the vote. The Communist Party gained two and a half times more and came first. Zhirinovsky’s ‘liberal democrats’ came third. For the first time, scaring the electorate with the ‘red and brown’ threat did not work. The vote for the Communists and Zhirinovsky was very obviously a protest vote. Public sentiment was made clear in opinion polls, which gave Yeltsin an approval rating of just 6 per cent.

The economic situation continued to deteriorate. The budget was coming apart at the seams. To solve the problem of budget revenues while simultaneously bringing in funds for his election campaign, Yeltsin embarked on an unheard-of privatization stunt: ‘deposit auctions’.

The mechanism was simple: a small group of bankers were handed Russia’s most promising enterprises as collateral (supposedly on a competitive basis). They made ‘loans’ to the state budget completely incommensurable with the real value of the enterprises. If the state was unable to repay those amounts, the enterprises would become the property of people who soon came to be known as ‘oligarchs’. It all duly happened. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there were legal irregularities in this corrupt merging of government and business.

In January 1996, Yeltsin announced he would probably agree to run for a second presidential term. On 1 March, just six months after the presidential decree pawning the state’s assets, he had a meeting with seven owners of the major private banking institutions. Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Potanin, Smolensky, Fridman, Aven and Khodorkovsky undertook to do, and indeed did, all that was necessary to finance Yeltsin’s re-election campaign and have him back as president of Russia.

The banking institutions that entered into this deal controlled, according to Berezovsky, more than half the Russian economy and, most importantly, all the television stations and almost all the media. The government decided to ‘re-elect’ itself with the aid of big finance, a virtual monopoly of the media and the state’s ‘administrative resources’. By fair means or foul.

Throughout 1995, I was constantly being asked whether I would run in the presidential election. I did not underestimate the obstacles and was in no hurry to reply. Most of my colleagues and friends were against my participating, and some, like Alexander Yakovlev and Vadim Medvedev, said so publicly. Raisa was also opposed, but I could not reconcile myself to the election being a choice between Yeltsin and Zyuganov. They were a pretty pair: one had destroyed the Soviet Union, shelled the first Russian parliament, fused government and big business together and given the green light to Russia’s criminals. The other had not repudiated Stalinist totalitarianism, approved of the deeds of the 1991 coup conspirators and had persuaded his party to support the Belovezha Accords with their votes in the Supreme Soviet of Russia.

I felt that to stay on the sidelines would be a dereliction of duty. I had to do what I could to unite the truly democratic, healthy forces capable of representing the interests of the majority of citizens and be a civic alternative to the Yeltsinites and Zyuganovites.

For that, however, action was needed. People had to be convinced. There was a need to explain the past and talk about the future. An election campaign provided a unique opportunity for that, and in the end I decided I could not ignore it.

My supporters set up a campaign team in February 1996 and began collecting signatures, of which we needed at least one million. I did not immediately make my decision public, but in an interview, in response to being asked yet again whether I intended to stand in the presidential election, I said the logic of events was inclining me towards doing so.

I invited all the political leaders of centre and centre-left parties to discuss uniting our efforts, and had meetings with their representatives. On 1 March 1996 I sent the media an appeal to all democratic forces titled ‘Give the people a choice’. It read:

Meanwhile, my supporters were collecting signatures in support of my nomination. The one million signatures were collected quickly and, on 21 March with the number of signatures exceeding 1.5 million, I announced, after long, serious consideration and hesitation, that I was joining the presidential race. In my announcement, I presented Russia’s rulers with a lengthy invoice for their failures:

I said I was making no secret of my aims and intentions:

The Central Electoral Commission registered me as a candidate for the presidency of Russia on 13 April. Many people, including friends and those closest to me, tried to dissuade me from joining the race but, once I had decided to do so, I was very conscious of their moral support. Raisa, who was not only doubtful but anxious (as it turned out, with good reason), was with me from beginning to end of the saga. She did not find the psychological burden easy to bear, particularly because the campaign immediately turned into a contest without rules.

Even before the presidential campaign got under way, violations of electoral law by the Presidential Administration and the other departments of the executive branch become increasingly blatant. The government would stop at nothing, and had the benefit of lavish funding for their own campaign.

Yeltsin’s election teams launched a high-cost, large-scale agitation and propaganda campaign with bands, singers and dancers and all the other razzmatazz, complete with catchy slogans previously honed on American voters: ‘Choose or Lose’, ‘Vote with Your Heart!’.

During the campaign, the fees payable to pop stars for concerts went through the roof. My assistant invited a celebrated music group under the direction of a musician I knew well to perform at one of my campaign meetings in Moscow, but the fee he named, considering it honest-to-God ‘mates’ rates’, was well beyond our means.

Then there were the vote-catching promises designed to draw electors to Yeltsin, despite the fact that the backlog of wages, pensions and welfare payments ran into billions of roubles. At the same time, orders were issued by officials in Moscow to local government workers. This was the remit of a team staffed by government officials and representatives of the intelligence services.

Ginger groups proliferated, as did teams, committees and movements, all designed to demonstrate ‘universal popular support’, all vying to outdo one another. In contravention of electoral law, a council was set up chaired by the incumbent president to coordinate the activities of the teams and associations to re-elect him. It included all the top government officials, from the prime minister to the director of the Federal Security Bureau. They co-opted the head of NTV, the only independent television station, which meant they had total control of television. The election was turned into a football match with one goal, trampling underfoot all moral and legal standards on the principle that the end justifies the means. The only force capable of effectively opposing this aggressive, lawless juggernaut would have been a joint effort by all the opposition’s democratic presidential candidates, but they proved to be disunited, unwilling and incapable of cooperating or compromising with each other. That fatal weakness was expertly exploited by the government.

Breaking through the conspiracy of silence

With the start of the election campaign, I again began travelling round the country, meeting people in the streets and squares, in businesses, educational institutions and public associations. I instantly came up against obstruction and attempts to disrupt my scheduled meetings. There were refusals to make premises available, and meetings would be moved at the last minute to less accessible and spacious venues. Meetings were banned at a number of educational institutions, including my own Stavropol Agricultural Institute.

As a rule, I found myself speaking in halls and at other locations that were full to bursting, with people standing in the aisles, sitting on the steps, the stage and the floor. Crowds stood at wide open doors where that was possible, or, sometimes, listened to the broadcast on local radio or from loudspeakers at the entrances.

I was subjected to a conspiracy of silence on the part of the media under government control, and to wild, venomous misconduct by extreme communist and nationalist groups. I came up against cutting discourtesy on the part of provincial leaders afraid to look me in the eye, who failed to appear either to welcome or to bid me goodbye.

In spite of all that, I had no intention of giving up on travelling around the country and meeting the voters. Between March and early June I visited dozens of cities in more than 20 regions and attended many meetings with thousands of people. They were organized in St Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk and Ulan-Ude, Kemerovo, Barnaul and Omsk, Volgograd and Rostov-on-Don. Also in Stavropol, Samara and Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Ufa and Vladimir. As a rule, several meetings were held in each city.

In a number of cities, television presenters behaved admirably and even, given the circumstances of the time, courageously. For example, in Rostov-on-Don I had a frank discussion with journalist Dmitry Dibrov, broadcast without any ‘editing’. In the same city, for over an hour, I answered questions from hundreds of Rostov citizens at an open-air gathering in the city park.

It sometimes seemed that the further we were from Moscow the more confidently and freely people behaved, including the local civic leaders. In the Altai I had meetings with the governor and the chairman of the regional legislative assembly, held a press conference and spoke on regional television.

Because more than a third of citizens in the Altai voted Communist, I particularly focused on them in my speech. Here is what I said, and I think it remains relevant today.

Over the months of the election campaign there were plenty of disagreeable experiences. Here is just one. On the morning of 24 April 1996, I arrived in Omsk where a meeting with the city’s voters had been announced. The region’s leaders ignored the meeting and a hostile crowd had gathered before the meeting at the Political Education Club. Representatives of the local administration suggested I should go in through the back entrance but I flatly refused. I walked calmly through the main entrance and foyer towards the stairs leading to the first floor and a crowded hall, where some 2,000 people were waiting. At this point a sinister-looking young man rushed forward and struck a blow on a part of my head that paratroopers are trained to strike. A security officer managed to push the attacker back and that helped to deflect the blow. At this point a group of individuals who had been standing to one side and watching attempted to free the attacker, who had been detained.

The start of the meeting was delayed and a fairly tense situation had arisen, further aggravated by groups who had infiltrated the hall with the clear intention of disrupting proceedings. This is how the outcome of the incident was described in Moskovskiye Novosti:

I believe the attack on me and the disruption of my speech to the people of Omsk were deliberately planned. I heard later that Zhirinovsky’s ‘Liberal Democratic’ Party had been behind the incident. A drunken LDP official let that slip at Zhirinovsky’s birthday party, saying, ‘What a reception we gave Gorbachev in Omsk!’ When I heard about that, I forwarded my information to the Prosecutor General’s Office, only to receive a meaningless bureaucratic non-response.

In a number of cities, Communist Party representatives tried to disrupt my meetings with heckling and barracking, but I gave them as good as I got, and others attending the meeting shut them up. At these meetings voters were constantly asking about my relations with other presidential candidates: Grigoriy Yavlinsky, Alexander Lebed and Svyatoslav Fedorov. Had we agreed to form a coalition of democratic forces? If you do not come to an agreement, I was told in no uncertain terms, you will just be asking us to waste our votes. The situation was described very bluntly: could I, Yavlinsky and the others not understand that our personal ambitions were completely irrelevant when what Russia needed was unity?

I did not regard Yavlinsky, Lebed or Fedorov as rivals but rather as partners, by and large, members of the same team. I believed that as each of us ran his own campaign it would become clear who had the best chance of winning, and we would then agree who should go forward as the unity candidate of the forces of democracy. That seemed to me entirely realistic, and I talked publicly about it. My visits to more than 20 regions persuaded me that a majority of people were entirely capable of seeing through the false choice being imposed on them and that there was a real demand for a third force.

The coming together never happened. My would-be partners lacked the political nous to see they would get nowhere on their own. The government actively fomented disunity among us, targeting primarily Lebed, whose popularity was in the ascendant. They allowed him to conduct his campaign unhampered and, after the first round of voting, seduced him with the offer of the post of secretary of the Russian Security Council. That left me with no option but to soldier on.

For the first time in several years I did get the opportunity of addressing the people on national television. There were no debates between the candidates (and to this day the Russian government evades them), but even a pre-recorded speech allowed me to explain my position to the viewers.

The first round of the presidential election showed that the government had, all the same, succeeded in imposing its choice between the twin evils of Yeltsin and Zyuganov, each of whom obtained around one-third of the vote. A unity candidate of pro-democracy forces would probably have been able to give them a run for their money, but in isolation we picked up a total of only about one-quarter of the vote between us. Although – who knows the truth of the matter? There was no shortage of outright falsification of results and underhand ‘electoral fixing’. The declared total of votes in my favour in the different regions came in everywhere at a remarkably similar figure of around 1 per cent. Opinion polls, and even the initial counts which were presumably leaked through an oversight, told a different story. It was straining credibility to claim that a candidate able to muster 1.5 million signatures for the nomination papers in such a short time could have received so few votes in the actual election.

There was a revealing and completely outrageous incident involving my representative, Artur Umansky. He told me over the telephone from Chechnya that he was coming to Moscow with documents about serious falsification of the election results. We learned that shortly afterwards armed men burst into his house and took him away. He was never seen again. Our numerous enquiries addressed to the Interior Ministry and Prosecutor General’s Office got nowhere.

I have often said that the most honest elections in the entire history of the USSR and Russian Federation were those of 1989 and 1990. No one questioned them: they were simply fair. Everything after that is a sorry tale of how, instead of genuine, fair elections, a mere surrogate is set up. Each year has seen increasing application of tricky new techniques and fixes to prevent free expression of the will of the people. Whose interest is it in? Ultimately, the economy and business suffer, whose leading figures provided the funds for Yeltsin’s campaign; and the intelligentsia, who failed to sound the alarm and, for the most part, chose to look away from all the illegality and abuses employed to keep the Communists out, which were so successfully trialled during this race.

Letters relating to the 1996 presidential election campaign

I have no regrets about participating in the 1996 election.

Discrediting elections

Yeltsin’s supporters were far from sure he would be victorious in the second round. Disagreements worsened within his team, as a result of which financial machinations surfaced, like the notorious ‘case of the Xerox box’, when it eventually came to light that both the rival factions within his team were carting illicit cash round the regions in boxes, bags and backpacks, and not forgetting to stuff their own pockets in the process. There had never been such discreditable election tactics before, and all for the sake of keeping an increasingly dysfunctional individual in the Kremlin!

None of those in the president’s entourage contemplated for an instant the option of giving up power. Among the options they did consider was cancelling the second round. They made no secret of it. Before the election, Yeltsin’s security chief, Alexander Korzhakov, publicly touted the idea of cancelling it entirely in order to ‘maintain public order’. They decided to go ahead with the second round only after they got the better of Alexander Lebed who, from inexperience, failed to realize they would dump him just as soon as they no longer needed him. I publicly warned him that throwing in his lot with either Yeltsin or the Communists would compromise him politically.

I had no doubt that the second round of the election would see all the irregularities that had marred the first part, only to an enhanced degree. The election, which fell far short of the international standards for fair elections (the West was curiously silent about this very obvious fact) demonstrated that Yeltsin had not gained the support of a majority of Russians.

Personally, I voted in the second round against both candidates (there was such an option at the time, but it has since been removed). It was my protest against the no-choice election. Millions of voters did the same, or refused to turn out for the second round. A poll conducted after the election revealed that 45 per cent of those who voted for Yeltsin did so not because they supported him, but because they did not want Zyuganov to be president.

In the interval between the first and second rounds of voting, Yeltsin was taken to hospital with a heart attack, but this was concealed from the electorate. On the day of the second vote he could not make it even to his local polling station, and voted in the Barvikha sanatorium. It reminded me of the occasion when the terminally ill Konstantin Chernenko voted in a ward at the Kremlin Hospital, which had been hastily disguised to look like an office. Yeltsin appeared in public only on the day of his re-inauguration. The ceremony was curtailed.

Immediately after the election, those who had managed and financed Yeltsin’s electoral campaign were appointed to the highest offices in the land. Anatoly Chubais became head of the Presidential Administration, Boris Berezovsky was appointed deputy secretary of the Security Council and Vladimir Potanin got the post of deputy prime minister. Yeltsin had heart surgery, and was unable to return to his presidential duties until six months later, at the beginning of 1997.

Commenting on the election after the results of the second round were announced, I said in an interview for Interfax that they showed a rift in Russian society that could only be overcome by a change of course and radically realigning reforms to benefit the great majority of Russians. While confrontation lasted, we had no prospect of clambering out of the crisis.

Regrettably, the ruling ‘elite’ drew their own conclusions from the 1996 election, and decided they could hoodwink tens of millions of people and blithely carry on with a parasitical course destructive for society and Russia. The result of their victory was that, only two years down the line, the regime, and with it the country’s economy, faced bankruptcy.

In an interview published in Novaya Gazeta, I talked with the paper’s editor, Dmitry Muratov, about what people could do who found the current situation unacceptable:

For the time being they are boasting about not changing course. They are trying to forget the methods they used to get that election ‘victory’. If the government starts thinking its win was an endorsement of its policies, a new, serious democratic opposition will very soon start to form.

If you look at who voted for Lebed, who voted for Yavlinsky, if you bear in mind the fact that 3.5 million people (and I imagine it was actually more) turned out and voted in the second round against both candidates, you will see there is a huge social base for a democratic opposition. Despite all the government’s efforts, their puppet parties are crumbling and will fall apart. There is a need for a genuine, natural coming together of people.

The Gorbachev Foundation’s ‘First Five-Year Plan’

In March 1997, our Foundation marked its fifth anniversary with a reception and round-table discussion. The main topic was the work of the Foundation and its search for a way to rescue Russia from systemic crisis. The meeting was attended by guests and partners: prominent academics, public figures, writers, press commentators and people from a broad spectrum of scholarly and artistic Moscow.

Opening the meeting, I thanked everyone who had worked with us all these years, and who had shown solidarity in difficult times when the very existence of the Foundation was under threat. It had been vital for the Foundation’s growth, and also very important for me personally. After stepping down from the presidency, it had been essential to create new precedents. Establishing centres of independent democratic thought and getting them to interact among themselves was crucial for Russia. The current political leadership and the bureaucracy were going to extraordinary lengths to prevent the assessments and conclusions of independent centres and the free press becoming available to society at large. Yet this was the only way to avoid at least the most unforgivable errors.

Given the increasing intimacy between the government bureaucracy and the mafia, it was more important than ever, no matter what the difficulties, to protect and cultivate the rudiments of civil society, and that was unthinkable without free speech and democratic thinking. Independent research centres and independent media could do a lot to preserve, develop and affirm democracy and democratic thinking in Russia. Without it, there was no way out of the situation in which we found ourselves.

For the moment, I said, we are very disunited, and that is how the government likes it. It tries to sow dissent between politicians and to split society in accordance with the divide and rule philosophy of ancient Rome. Let us try to find a way, I urged, to overcome this dangerous state of affairs. Our Foundation is open to interaction and collaboration with a great diversity of thinkers in Russia and abroad. Our mission is to work together to find a way out of Russia’s current crisis.

Here are a number of contributions by those participating in the round table. They reflect the range of opinions and assessments we heard:

Drawing the discussion to a close, I said:

The elections fail to bring stability

The end of the presidential election did not bring even temporary political stabilization. Although the government lost no time in cynically reneging on their campaign promises, Russia’s financial system was in tatters. There was a rapidly increasing avalanche of defaults and arrears within the state budget, social inequalities deepened, the country continued its slide into deindustrialization, and still there was no sign of a coherent economic and industrial policy on the part of the state.

It was reported that enormous numbers of working people in many sectors of the economy and in many regions had not received their wages and salaries for six months or more. In October 1996, pension arrears reached 13.3 trillion roubles ($2.5 billion). A conference of Tatarstan judges issued a statement:

January 1997 saw the publication of a statement addressed to the president of Russia by prominent economists, academicians and Nobel Prize-winners. They saw the state’s withdrawal from its regulatory functions as being the primary cause of the decline, collapse, plundering and criminalization of the economy. This had produced ‘horrifying social consequences’, including a huge increase in the number of completely penurious people.

The inevitable consequences of the policies of the past six years were increasingly obvious. In an article published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Anatoly Kulikov wrote:

On 6 March 1997, Yeltsin gave an address to the Federal Assembly titled ‘Order in the government means order in the country’. It was, of course, impossible for him not to be aware that the people were tired of chaos. It was essential, he said, to restore order, not dictatorial order but democratic order. In response to the president’s address, I warned, ‘Nothing is said in this speech about what matters most: analysis of the causes of the severe crisis in which our society finds itself.’ The impression given was that Yeltsin was again going to back not a change of policy, but increased pressure to force through a course of action that had already led Russia to an impasse. ‘If that is the case, if my suspicions and assessment prove correct, we can expect more shocks.’

Opinion polls detected a growing wave of protest, but the president and his ‘renewed team’ were disinclined to listen to what people thought, and saw the way forward as being a ‘more resolute’ pushing ahead with the old course. In June, I shared my concerns with the readers of Novaya Gazeta:

Looking back at the events of 1997 in an interview for NTV, I had to confirm that my worst expectations had come to pass. ‘The stunt of trying to revive the economy with Shock Therapy, Mk II, has failed. Gambling on a further round of privatization without economic recovery, without creating and developing the domestic market, without increasing effective consumer demand, is futile.’

I remembered what Academician Alexander Nekipelov had said at a Gorbachev Foundation conference in late November 1996: ‘Ultimately we can expect an overall financial crisis.’ But 1997 had brought no changes for the better. It was clear that this phase, without any clear purpose, without a meaningful policy, could not continue for long.

The storm breaks in 1998

The Russian state was in dire financial straits. Foreign debt had risen to 146.4 per cent of GDP. In the first three months of 1998 the state debt in overdue wages and salaries of public employees rose to an astronomical total of 58 billion denominated roubles, about $9 billion. In just two months the population’s income fell 7 per cent.

Attempting to find a way of servicing its growing debt, the government tried constructing a financial pyramid scheme, issuing short-term treasury bills at ever higher interest rates. Capital outflow accelerated, increasing pressure on the artificially inflated rouble exchange rate.

In an effort to delay the collapse, the government introduced a rigid restriction of the money supply, which entailed non-payment of wages and pensions, default on government contracts, etc. Economic stagnation worsened, budget revenues were insufficient to cover loan payments, social tensions increased, one strike followed another.

One might have thought it would have been obvious to anybody that a new course and new people were needed, but it was not obvious to the president. The main thing, he declared in a message to the Federal Assembly, was ‘to overcome despondency and negative attitudes’. The message abounded with wild assertions testifying to the fact that the president had finally parted company with reality.

At the start of the year I wrote in an article for Novaya Gazeta,

I was outraged by the Russian government’s indifference to people’s welfare:

The worsening situation in the country and the lack of carefully considered government policies were aggravating tensions within Yeltsin’s entourage. There were efforts to paper over the cracks, but on 23 March 1998 the dam burst: by presidential decree, Boris Yeltsin dismissed the entire Russian government of Viktor Chernomyrdin. A further decree dismissed First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais.

‘It would seem’, I said in an interview for Moskovsky Komsomolets [Moscow Young Communist], ‘that Yeltsin and his immediate entourage think the president is losing control of the situation.’ This was a turf war between factions. Berezovsky, Yumashev and Diachenko were one gang. Nemtsov was looking for a niche (and supporters), Chubais was looking for his niche, and Chernomyrdin was yet another gang. Everything was falling apart and the president was unable to hold the ring. On top of everything, there were rumours that the president’s mental powers were failing. While in Washington, Lebed said as much to the US Congress.

The political motivation for dismissing the government was clear to me: Yeltsin wanted to show how decisive he was and how completely in control. As Chernomyrdin’s successor, Yeltsin was proposing Sergey Kirienko, an ‘energetic technocrat’, young, capable, but completely unknown and lacking sufficient experience to manage a nation.

Yeltsin’s decision could open the way to a number of political moves and scenarios very remote from democracy. In an interview for Interfax, I gave a warning about this. The Duma might not approve Kirienko’s candidacy, I said, and that might even be the president’s intention: to provide himself with a pretext for dissolving the State Duma. I warned against that, and expressed the hope that he would not attempt to go down that road. I said, ‘We are faced with another crisis typical of this regime, which is rooted in a crisis with their policies.’

Kirienko’s candidacy was rejected by the Duma, which twice refused to approve him. Yeltsin proposed the same candidate yet again and had the option, under the constitution, of dissolving the Duma in the event of a third rejection. There has probably never before in Russia been such broad agreement of political forces of every persuasion that the president was the root cause of instability in Russia. It was impossible to predict how the deputies would behave in the third vote.

At the third vote, they did, nevertheless, endorse Kirienko. The new prime minister announced that the government was proposing a new economic policy, whose main thrust would be to revitalize industrial production. It proved to be a mirage. Things could not have gone worse with the economy. The government was incapable of controlling it.

In an interview on 8 August I had to state that the government had failed. With 80 per cent of the population against it, there was nothing it could do. Kirienko had neither a strong team nor the confidence of the public.

A way out of the predicament was possible only by democratic means: ‘Let people whom the nation trusts come to power through elections. Without the asset of trust, nobody can get Russia out of her state of crisis. Yeltsin had that asset once, but has it no longer.’

The president and government did not want to admit their inadequacy. On 14 August, Yeltsin was still trying to assure the world: ‘There will be no devaluation. I am saying that clearly and firmly. I am not just fantasizing: all the sums have been done.’ Just three days later, on 17 August, the government and Central Bank announced restructuring of the national debt through government bonds, which in reality meant a technical default, and a move to a floating rouble. They had to abandon support for the rouble.

This signified a total failure of the macroeconomic policy the Russian government had been pursuing in 1992–8. The economy suffered a further heavy blow: the Russian rouble lost two-thirds of its value, and people again lost their savings in whole or in part. There was a significant fall in industrial output and living standards, and a sharp increase in inflation.

An economy based on speculation, a corrupt government, a rampant crime wave, tens of millions of people deprived of all support: such was the economic legacy of the ‘Yeltsin Era’. On 21 August a majority of deputies in the Duma called on Yeltsin to resign voluntarily (only 32 deputies voted in support of him). Plans were afoot in the Duma to have him impeached.

The Impeachment Commission invited me to speak at its meeting on 24 August. I replied that I did not intend to be present in person, because those actively participating in it, and even some of its members, had been supporters of the State Emergency Committee or involved in disrupting the signing of the Union Treaty. I was, however, prepared to submit testimony in writing. In the meantime the Duma passed a resolution advising Yeltsin to cease exercising his authority before completion of his term. The suggestion was timely, and I concurred with it.

How to come out of the crisis?

What was the president to do? Yeltsin decided to bring back Chernomyrdin and appointed him acting prime minister.

I could not see the appointment contributing to lifting Russia out of the crisis because it did not represent any change of policy. The Duma twice rejected the proposal. Given the situation, Yeltsin was now forced to retreat and, on 10 September at Yavlinsky’s suggestion, he proposed Yevgeny Primakov for the post of prime minister. That gained parliamentary approval the following day. Yury Maslyukov, a former chairman of Gosplan, the USSR’s State Planning Agency, joined the new government along with him. At the same time, Sergey Dubinin was replaced as head of the Central Bank by Viktor Gerashchenko.

I was positively besieged with requests to comment on their appointments. These were people I knew well. ‘Yevgeny Primakov’, I stated immediately after his nomination, ‘is a man well able to form a government enjoying the confidence of the nation, a government expressing the interests of the nation rather than of 10 or 12 or 20 per cent of the population of Russia, or of some group.’ I described him as an independent person with broad horizons, with a good understanding of the situation in Russia and the world, and expressed confidence that his government would ‘go for a policy of avoiding extreme radical liberalism while also avoiding a return to the past’.

I was sure Primakov was tough enough not to succumb to pressure, to stabilize the situation and create the conditions for early elections. I saw that as the way to bring about an overall improvement of the situation.

Primakov’s government introduced fundamental changes in economic policy. It completely abandoned the practice of restricting money supply by failing to pay salaries, pensions and defaults on government contracts. The size of the backlog of debt on public sector wages was significantly reduced over the next few months. The financial situation was brought under control.

Describing the work of Primakov’s government, I stated at a Gorbachev Foundation conference in November 1998: ‘Even before the August events, we said the country was on the threshold of political change. Now we see that Primakov’s government is already something of an antidote to the present system.’ It was clear to everybody, I said, that change in Russia was inevitable. ‘No matter how long Yeltsin remains at the helm, one year or two, or whether they come up with some kind of presidency for life, that era is now over.’

The only person who did not see that was Yeltsin himself. There was suddenly a discussion of whether he had the right to run for president in 2000, when what needed to be considered was not some fantasy option of prolonging Yeltsin’s political career but of planning his departure at an early date and holding parliamentary and presidential elections as soon as possible. Yeltsin was spending a great deal of time in hospital, and if the president is not functioning, I said, the whole system will be limping along. ‘In the current situation’, I said, ‘the right thing is for Boris Yeltsin to resign.’

The growing authority of Primakov and his government gave grounds to speak of the emergence of a strong potential candidate for president. I mentioned this in an interview for Nezavisimaya Gazeta: ‘If we can manage to implement Primakov’s new approach, I think the country will move forward. And if good fortune accompanies him, he will be the best candidate for the presidency. As far as the office of prime minister is concerned, I believe the most suitable figure is Yury Luzhkov.’

Yeltsin and his entourage, however, did not trust Primakov and his cabinet. They had different ideas about continuity of power, the more so because Primakov was openly talking about his intention of taking decisive action against corruption. The Prosecutor General, Yury Skuratov, had announced that criminal proceedings were being initiated in connection with the financial default and transactions in government securities.

The closer the time came for the next elections, the more Yeltsin and his entourage mulled over what kind of government they would find it easiest to live with. Before long, television commentaries were beginning to resemble bulletins from the front: ‘Yeltsin did not shake hands with Primakov’, ‘the president did not even look in Primakov’s direction’.

In May, the question of removing Yeltsin from office was again raised in the Duma. I had ambivalent feelings about the impeachment move, which I explained in an interview for Interfax. Those initiating the procedure would find it difficult to substantiate their allegations, I warned. ‘To take one example: the question of wrecking the Union. This was a huge misfortune, but the Belovezha Accords were ratified by the Russian parliament, which was 85 per cent Communist. They all stood up and cheered as they voted to destroy the Union, so it is six of one and half a dozen of the other. The same is true of all the other charges.’

Before the impeachment vote, Yeltsin undertook a pre-emptive strike by dismissing Primakov’s government. I described the president’s decision as mistaken and said it could lead to the destruction of the new, hard-won stability. The country might be plunged into a serious constitutional crisis. The Duma was evidently reluctant to risk that, although a substantial majority of deputies voted to impeach Yeltsin on account of his actions in Chechnya. The majority was not, however, large enough for the decision to pass. The Duma then approved the president’s proposal to appoint Sergey Stepashin as the new prime minister. He said he would continue Primakov’s policies but was silent on the subject of his predecessor’s achievements. I immediately detected that the Stepashin government was temporary, a mere tactic. Yeltsin was looking for someone more suitable in terms of his own interests. Once again, the interests of Russia took second place.

Letters of support

Raisa Gorbacheva

In January 1999 I went to St Petersburg with Raisa for, as it proved, the last time. An interview she gave to Smena was recently discovered in our archive. I was very moved to read it: