Emboldened by Gorbachev’s aversion to violence and repression, regional elites started to pull away from Moscow, declaring ‘sovereignty’ in their own affairs. Lithuania, which had been occupied by the Soviet forces since the Second World War, was among the first to use this window of opportunity. Its Communist Party quit the all-Soviet structure. ‘Do you really want to leave?’ Gorbachev questioned the Lithuanian intelligentsia as he tried to persuade them to stay with the flock. ‘Yes’ came a resolute answer.
In May 1990 Yeltsin was elected president of Russia – the largest and most important of the Soviet republics – and a month later, on 12 June 1990, Russia’s Supreme Soviet followed the example of Lithuania and voted for Russia’s sovereignty. On the same day the Soviet government abolished censorship and passed a new media law that turned freedom of speech from a privilege granted from above into a legal right. The coincidence of dates was symbolic.
Gorbachev desperately tried to stop Yeltsin’s being elected as Russia’s leader. The KGB planted stories about him in Pravda and showed embarrassing videotapes of Yeltsin’s visit to America where he appeared to be drunk. But with the media no longer under central control, this did not have much impact: few people in 1990 read Pravda or paid attention to the party line. Yeltsin enjoyed mass popular support and was unstoppable.
The attitude of Perestroika reformers towards Yeltsin was more ambivalent. On the one hand Yegor and his circle of journalists refused to participate in a campaign against Yeltsin. On the other hand, they considered Yeltsin as a dangerous populist force who was calling for the break-up of the Soviet Union under the guise of Russian sovereignty. At the end of May 1990, Rodric Braithwaite, the British ambassador in Moscow, who dropped in on Yegor, found him unusually depressed. ‘He says that the new government structures are simply not working, and there is a real risk of chaos… He is as gloomy as I’ve ever seen him: not the volatile gloom to which the Moscow intelligentsia has always been subject, but a settled depression which is much more worrying.’10 Yegor was not alone in this. Braithwaite himself was apprehensive.
Foreign governments felt far more comfortable with an enlightened party man like Gorbachev, in whom they had heavily invested, than with a popular leader like Yeltsin. When, in September 1990, Douglas Hurd, the British foreign secretary, and Braithwaite went to see Yeltsin, they were almost hostile in their predisposition.
Yeltsin receives us in a small room on the fourth floor – part no doubt of his pose of simplicity… But he still exudes raw power – though, as far as I am concerned, very little of the charm he is also said to possess… In general, I conclude that Yeltsin has very little interest in policy matters. He is interested in power, and his current tactic is to… emasculate and discredit the Union government, and so isolate Gorbachev – as a step towards eliminating Gorbachev as well. He hopes to achieve this, not by intellectual ability or imagination, but simply by the force of this will. Many of his proclaimed policy objectives look hopelessly unattainable. But like Hitler, he evidently believes in the Triumph of the Will, in its ability to achieve what more ordinary people say is impossible.11
Few people realized at the time that Yeltsin, while seeking to eschew Soviet power structures, was the only consolidating figure in the country, who offered the best hope for preserving Russia itself from disintegration and a collapse into civil war. There was no reason why some of the regions of Russia, particularly the ethnically based ones, should not demand their own sovereignty. In fact, many of them did. Yeltsin’s offer to the regional elites ‘to take as much sovereignty as they could swallow’ but stay within the Russian Federation was the only way of keeping Russia together.
The party, which in the eyes of Gorbachev’s supporters – at home and abroad – was ‘the only force capable of holding the fractured society together’, in Yeltsin’s eyes was a superfluous burden which had to be cast off altogether. This was precisely what Yeltsin did, formally quitting the party at the 28th Congress which also turned out to be its last.
Alexander Yakovlev, who had as few illusions about the party as did Yeltsin, faced the choice of abandoning the ship or staying with Gorbachev to the end. He stayed with Gorbachev. So did Yegor. As he wrote in Moskovskie novosti, ‘I am far from blaming people who have acted according to their convictions [and quit the party]. I will be honest: there were moments at the Congress when I also had an inexpungible desire to return my mandate along with my party membership card.’12
His reasoning for not succumbing to this desire had nothing to do with ideology. ‘There is no power equal to that of the party. And this party boasts a politicized army and the KGB, a combination of Soviet and party posts, ownership of a vast amount of property and monopoly over the media… And if that is so, how can one distance oneself from this colossus and transfer it into the sole possession of the conservatives?’13 The status of a patrician entailed a sense of personal responsibility. At the same time, Yegor faced the dilemma of what to do next with the paper.
On 1 October, Moskovskie novosti was published with the new strap-line ‘an independent newspaper’. The question of its future was openly debated on its pages. Alexander Yakovlev suggested that the task of Moskovskie novosti should be to appeal to and form the middle class – not the intelligentsia, dependent on the state, but a class of professionals who could support themselves and not rely on the state for handouts. These were the people who could move Russia forward. Nikolai Shmelev, a popular economics writer, backed Yakovlev: people were fed up with any party-mindedness or ideology. ‘Let the newspaper follow in the footsteps of the 18th-century enlighteners. Let it try to appeal to the intellectual and humane features of the bourgeoisie, to those shoots of goodness which are not yet completely destroyed in people. Let its slogan be: “Long live common sense and decency.”’14 Decency and common sense were in very short supply. The benign instincts of the European bourgeoisie were virtually extinct. The Party and the KGB still had a few surprises in store.
Denouement
Faced with mounting pressures – both economic and political – Gorbachev dithered. His attempts to reconcile Yeltsin’s programme of economic liberalization with retaining state control predictably yielded nothing but more frustration. Yeltsin, fed up with Gorbachev’s unwillingness to face reality and agree to urgent reforms, threatened a complete secession of Russia from the Soviet Union – effectively a liquidation of the USSR.
Yeltsin’s speech was an ultimatum and Gorbachev perceived it as such. ‘What does Yeltsin’s speech mean?’ Gorbachev questioned his presidential council. ‘It is a declaration of war to the Kremlin. If we don’t take retaliatory measures, we will be defeated,’ replied Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB. Nikolai Ryzhkov, Gorbachev’s prime minister, painted a gloomy picture: ‘The country is becoming ungovernable. It is on the verge of disintegration. Our power may not extend beyond the Kremlin walls or the Garden Ring [Road]. And that is all. The system of government is destroyed and we are responsible for it. We have to show that we are in power!’15
Like every Soviet government before it, Gorbachev’s Politburo reached out for the two main levers of power – the police and the media – only to discover that neither of them was available. The police was headed by Vadim Bakatin, an intelligent, decent and pragmatic man of liberal views who refused to ban mass demonstrations or to use force against them. This was not a matter of softness, but of common sense. Dispersing a crowd of 400,000 people was physically impossible. When Kryuchkov demanded that Bakatin should ‘demonstrate power’, Bakatin told him: ‘You show it. Let those who wish to ban those protests put these bans into practice. The police are not going to do this.’16