Our foreign partners are also involved, because what happens here in the coming months will have repercussions for the entire global process. We want the policy of transformation to be carried forward. We want the reforms to continue and democracy to grow stronger, so I would ask our foreign partners to join in supporting this country, perhaps even to turn a blind eye to some things, because the stakes are very high for everyone. As the top priority I would put the need for material support for Russia, not only political, but in every other respect. She will have a great and influential role to play in the future.
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.
Shock Therapy
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.