Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  The coup was the last gasp of the Soviet regime. Its leaders had launched an attack on their own people, the most overt negation of democracy, and their treachery discredited the key institutions of a failing state: the KGB, the Communist Party and the General Staff. Instead of introducing military rule, the tank crews stepped out on to pavements littered with long-stemmed red flowers. In the capital of almost every republic, popular coalitions rushed to declare their independence from the disgraced Soviet regime. Their demands were among the many things that Gorbachev was ready to rethink. From his rooms in Foros, the Soviet president resumed command of the Kremlin regiment and ordered its commandant to seal the conspirators’ offices and disconnect their phones.125 He refused to receive the plotters, too, even those who had once been his friends, resolving to create a new regime with new, untainted, men. As he put it to the reporters who were waiting when his plane landed at Moscow airport, ‘I have come back from Foros to a different country, and I myself am a different man now.’126 But that still left all the main questions moot. ‘Yes, we won,’ Izvestiya’s correspondent commented on 23 August. ‘But our victory only gives us a chance, a possibility. Will we, and will our leaders, know how to use it?’127

  * * *

  Before the last of his supporters had dispersed from the White House, Boris Yeltsin announced that he was moving into the Kremlin. For a man whose sense of destiny was so enlarged, there really was no other choice. Whatever Gorbachev was trying to defend, Yeltsin was creating a new era. In his own view – and many shared it – he was also the saviour of Russia, the sort of person who had always based his government in Moscow’s citadel. At a time of tension and uncertainty, the old place seemed a perfect surrogate for consensus, the symbol of a nation that had yet to coalesce. Though no-one was yet sure what Russia was, the Russian flag – red, white and blue – was raised above the Kremlin walls on 24 August 1991.

  At the time, the most positive interpretation of Yeltsin’s move was that he was taking control of the fortress in the name of the common man. This president was famed for riding on the bus like everybody else, after all, and even when he was not standing bravely on a tank, he was a real Russian with the manners and the appetites to match. ‘The Kremlin was the symbol of stability, duration, and determination in the political line being conducted,’ Yeltsin himself explained. ‘If reforms were to be my government line, that was the statement I was making to my opponents by moving into the Kremlin.’128 But there were other ways of reading Yeltsin’s ambitions. An impulsive and intolerant man, a political animal whose basic instincts were more authoritarian than democratic, Yeltsin seemed to hunger for a throne.129 He was also eager to make his position secure. ‘The country’s entire defence system is hooked up to the Kremlin,’ he explained. The citadel was the centre of a massive web: ‘all the coded messages from all over the world are sent here, and there is a security system for the buildings developed down to the tiniest detail.’130 As he later added, putting it in the bluntest terms, only another coup could prise a man from power once he was inside.131

  The irony was that another leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was still in residence. The Communist Party might have been disgraced (and Yeltsin moved against it immediately that August, seizing its assets and closing its main offices), but the people had asked Gorbachev, in the referendum in March, to redesign the Soviet Union, and the Kremlin, still in Soviet guise, remained his official headquarters. For twelve weeks at the end of 1991, there were two presidents in the Moscow fortress, which also meant two teams of presidential aides, two types of protocol, and regular collisions between rival television crews as they raced between the press-conferences of the Russian and the Soviet heads of state.

  Some institutions vanished within days. Almost at once, and to a chorus of public abuse, the Communist Party’s Central Committee was pitched out of its building on Old Square. The site, no longer sacrosanct, became 150,000 square metres’ worth of prime city-centre real estate with a market value of 137 million rubles.132 Crowds of protesters gathered every day, many demanding to see secret files, and at one point, on 29 August, a mob of two or three hundred threatened to storm the place. Only armed guards saved the bureaucrats inside.133 Chernyaev was among the last to leave. He and his team had barely three hours’ notice, and as the minutes slipped away the sea of faces in the street grew more and more menacing. Eventually, police appeared and led the officials to a basement. ‘There our guards made phone calls for a long time,’ Chernyaev wrote. The frightened group followed the policemen deeper still under the building, entering tunnels that none had ever visited before. The brightly lit podzemka, the underground tram, awaited. Chernyaev’s team made its escape, some time later, by coming up through a vault in the Kremlin’s Senate precinct.134

  Cleared of the Party apparat, Old Square became the headquarters of the government of Russia. The Kremlin was reserved for presidential staff. Yeltsin’s team was based in Block 14, the former theatre on the old monastery site, and his presidential office was here as well, in full view of the Senate but not quite as grand. Gorbachev still occupied the smartest rooms, but Yeltsin’s aides moved into theirs with roguish triumph, hungry for the trappings and the benefits of power. The former occupants of Block 14, the stubborn henchmen of the Soviet age, were given only hours to leave, and many were obliged to abandon quantities of files, including what turned out to be the transcripts of every telephone conversation Yeltsin had made since he and Gorbachev had clashed in 1987.135 This sort of thing was bound to sour the atmosphere, but there were also tensions inside Yeltsin’s camp. In the political free-for-all that summer, two of the Russian president’s closest aides, Viktor Iliushin and Gennady Burbulis, spent precious days immediately after the coup locked in dispute over a Kremlin office that had recently been renovated to the coveted ‘European’ standard, complete with a small annex and a private gym.136 Yeltsin left the pair to fight: in late August, he disappeared on holiday.

  His absence brought an interlude of chaos and political fudge. But in the midst of much uncertainty, some scenes that autumn could be comic. The Soviet Union’s impending break-up led to a shortage of wine in the citadel, for the Kremlin cellars had been stocked with cabernet from Soviet Moldavia (soon known as Moldova, and not Soviet), and as the last supplies of that ran out no-one could bring themselves to order a foreign alternative.137 New Kremlin staff, faced with a bank of telephones, had to call the security office to find out how they worked.138 And the personal rivalry between Yeltsin and Gorbachev was manifest. Andrei Grachev, then Gorbachev’s presidential press secretary, recalled what happened on 28 October, when Gorbachev was due to receive the Cypriot president. The Catherine Hall, where such meetings traditionally took place, had been booked in advance by Yeltsin, so Gorbachev was forced to use the studio-office that had been created in the 1980s for his television appearances. There was a piquancy, now, in the fact that the battery of photogenic telephones along the desk had never been connected to anything. Someone also noticed that one of the office doors had warped. As it swung in the draught, it creaked so loudly that the interpreters could not make out what the leaders were trying to say. A Kremlin guard had to be called to hold it shut from the outside until the session ended.139

  The creaking and the pointless telephones were perfect metaphors for Gorbachev’s presidency after August 1991. The heads of almost all the former Soviet states were still engaged in talks with him, the aim of which was to produce a new-style Union, but at the same time Yeltsin was privately canvassing the influential players with a scheme to break the whole empire apart.140 In public, his speeches were about the things Russia could do alone. When he appeared on people’s screens, it was always to the backdrop of Russia’s tricolour. By contrast, Gorbachev’s protocol team was regularly faced with a last-minute choice between the Russian and the Soviet banners. Left to himself, the Soviet president would always opt for the latter, and his private plane, ‘The Soviet Union’, boasted a scarlet tail-fin to the last.141
>
  But there would soon be no Soviet land to fly over. On 1 December 1991, the people of Ukraine, Russia’s most cherished close neighbour, voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence. It was the last blow to Gorbachev’s plan to reconceive the Soviet Union, and it allowed Yeltsin to trump him with a treaty that he had already negotiated, in semi-secret, at the Belovezhsky Nature Reserve in Belarus.142 This formed a patchwork of new, independent nations, who worked on their common problems together for a few more months before drifting apart. Gorbachev’s purpose, his role as Union President, was dead.

  There was a lot of talking in the final weeks, but at the birth of this new version of Russia, there were real things, not just ideas, to hand over. In December 1991, Yeltsin took control of an extensive nuclear weapons system: the ‘button’ came in the shape of a ‘nuclear briefcase’, made by Samsonite, containing digital codes.143 As the clock ticked down to zero hour, however, Gorbachev also gave him several ziggurats of files. The Kremlin’s hidden trove of documents included details of the Chernobyl disaster, but history played the largest role, and the records testified to many acts that were officially denied. The presidential archive contained secrets about the Afghan war, about political repression under Khrushchev, and many papers bearing Stalin’s pencil marks, one of which proved to be the original draft of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. Such files, like well-primed nuclear bombs, had been passing from general secretary to general secretary for half a century. Central Committee staff had always denied their existence, and even Gorbachev had not released them in the glasnost years. ‘Take them,’ he told the latest heir. ‘They’re yours now.’144

  Among the very few who witnessed the two leaders’ final meeting in the Kremlin’s Walnut Room was Andrei Grachev. That is, he and the other closest aides waited in a nearby lobby for ten hours. ‘Our only source of information’, according to Grachev, ‘was Zhenya, the Kremlin waiter, who was shuttling back and forth between the Walnut Room and the kitchen carrying bottles and plates.’145 ‘Our conversation was protracted and difficult,’ Yeltsin later insisted, though Grachev’s source reported that ‘the mood seem[ed] to be good’.146 The press did not even have Zhenya’s bulletins, and state radio channels followed Soviet tradition by playing endless broadcasts of the ‘Dance of the Cygnets’ from Swan Lake. The next day, however, again in that sham television office, a solemn Gorbachev signed his last presidential statement, borrowing a pen from the man from CNN. His final address as president was dignified and he used a phrase that Russians would not often hear again. ‘I make this decision,’ he explained, ‘based on considerations of principle.’147

  It was all over in minutes. The cameras followed Mikhail Gorbachev inside the Senate as he closed his office door.148 By the time the foreign journalists were ready to start filming on the streets outside, the Soviet flag had vanished from the Senate roof. The world was later treated to the spectacle of its removal by courtesy of Russian private enterprise. Though the professionals had missed it, a group of Muscovites had captured the lowering of the Kremlin’s last red flag with an imported camcorder. A copy of their VHS cassette cost less than fifty US dollars, cash.149

  12

  Normality

  Boris Yeltsin moved into Gorbachev’s office as soon as the cleaners had emptied the bin. The brass plate on the former president’s door was taken down that very night (Yeltsin’s men would later claim that Gorbachev’s staff retaliated, on their way out, by unscrewing some of the other fittings and pocketing several gold fountain pens with the official crest).1 The red flag that had flown above the Senate roof for seven decades was gone, and many hoped that the remaining Soviet legacies would disappear as fast. Optimists had taken to describing the entire interlude of Communist rule as an aberration, an experiment; they argued that the time had come for Russia to revert to its true path. If there were doubts about what that might mean, in view of Moscow’s turbulent, eclectic history, they were ignored in the euphoria of victory. As the clock on the Kremlin’s Saviour Tower struck midnight at the turn of the New Year, 1992, the famous chimes were drowned out by the sound of fireworks. The champagne flowed and people sang; everyone believed they had a right, now, to what they had begun to call a normal life.2

  What they got was hardship and uncertainty. The list of problems that the new republic faced would have challenged a far stronger and more deeply rooted regime. From environmental degradation and low productivity to the collapse of public infrastructures, the Soviet legacy was crippling enough on its own. But the new state’s headlong economic reforms added further stress, precipitating high rates of mortality and record levels of crime, hyper-inflation, and shortages of everything from food to anti-cancer drugs.3 The Russian Ministry of the Interior estimated that by 1993, 85 per cent of the new private banks had links to organized crime. So did almost half the country’s businesses, which was not surprising when even an honest trader could not survive without paying for protection (colloquially known as a ‘roof’) and following underworld rules.4 The official murder rate in Moscow increased eight-fold between 1989 and 1993; the true figure was probably blacker still.5 Unsurprisingly, almost no-one was prepared to gamble on the new republic’s future prosperity. The 1990s saw a massive haemorrhage of capital from Russia to safe havens such as London and New York. Since most of it was exported illegally, the figures are hard to establish, but estimates for the period 1990–95 vary between about 65 and 400 billion US dollars.6

  In this unpromising environment the challenge Russia’s leaders faced was to build a credible, resilient and dignified state. The tsars had used religious iconography and stunning public splendour to achieve this; Lenin had invoked the sacred blood of martyrs and the proletarian revolution. From Ivan the Terrible and Mikhail Romanov to Stalin, no-one had expected any newly formed regime to flourish without a convincing pedigree and some form of mission. In the 1990s, however, the new state had few options on either score. In most societies – the ones that do not doubt their own normality – shared values tend to go unspoken and are almost always fluid anyway. But post-Communist Russia faced a moral crisis. Yeltsin was keen to make sure that it remained neither Soviet nor Communist, but Russia was not European and its people were not ready to accept the triumph of the west. That left a void, a kind of vertigo, especially in a society that had lived so long in the shadow of successive all-encompassing ideas.

  The republic that Boris Yeltsin had inherited could still claim to be the largest country in the world, but it was no longer a superpower, no longer the seat of a dynastic monarchy, no longer exotic or even splendid. Even its once-mighty army did not look particularly fearsome any more. Throughout Russian history, shaky and parvenu regimes had invoked versions of the past to build legitimacy in circumstances such as these, but even that was awkward for the leaders of new Russia. The state could hardly celebrate the Soviet years, and yet its leaders had been raised as communists; many had built their careers by denouncing capitalist values and systems of privilege. In his days as provincial Sverdlovsk’s Party boss, Yeltsin himself had ordered the demolition of a house that had served as the final prison of Nicholas II and his family. At the time, as a communist, he had argued that the place should not become a shrine. As president, ironically, shrines were exactly what he was about to need.

  If Yeltsin had consulted his old friends, the leaders of the other former republics of the old USSR, he would have heard how they made use of nationalist rhetoric, exploiting their historic sufferings to forge new nations, or at least to garner millions of votes. But Russian politicians could not take this argument too far, and not merely because theirs was the nation that had historically oppressed the rest. The other problem was that Moscow was still in charge of an empire. The population of Yeltsin’s new state, which was nearly 148 million in 1991, was overwhelmingly (more than 80 per cent) Russian by ethnicity, but apart from the core ‘Russian’ lands, it also included the whole of oil- and gas-rich Siberia as well as formerly tribal territories on the northe
rn slopes of the Caucasus, such as Chechnya, North Ossetia and Kabardino-Balkaria.7 Adopting a specious label designed to incorporate these valuable minorities, Moscow dubbed its new country the ‘Russian Federation’, a name derived from Soviet times and intended to suggest an equal partnership between the peoples of its several regions. In reality, the Russian heartland, and the Russian nation, dominated the political landscape and continued to dictate the cultural tone. But something more was still needed: some dignity and charisma, some sense of purpose and collective pride.

  The answer could have been provided by democracy itself; in many countries, after all, government gets its real splendour from the idea of consent. As the rotten Soviet empire fell apart in the autumn of 1991, there was no reason to accept that Russians were in some way doomed to perpetual tyranny, or that their future had been bound and chained by history. The chance had come to create a new state. Admittedly, the White House building in Moscow was far from regal; it looked more like an airport terminal than a palace. The parliament that sat in it, moreover, had been elected under Soviet rules, and it remained a creature of the corrupt Soviet world. But even that anachronism could have been remedied by a round of fresh elections. Unfortunately, however, Yeltsin’s own ambition had centred on the only real prize he knew, Kremlin-style power, and once he had his office in the fort he left outstanding details to his aides, a group with little appetite for tedious election-fights. The crucial summer ebbed away, and in October 1991, the hacks and demagogues filed back to their accustomed seats in the White House chamber.8