Moscow, December 25, 1991

There are hundreds of books to be stored in cardboard boxes: volumes on Russian history by Solovyev, Kluchevsky, and Karamzin; a ten-volume edition of Pushkin’s works; books of verse by Lermontov, the Romantic poet of the Caucasus, and by Mayakovsky, the lyricist of the Bolshevik Revolution; rows of the leather-bound writings of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin; individual favorites like a wellthumbed copy of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, which Gorbachev maintains helped turn him into an opponent of the totalitarian system; a memoir by Sakharov that Gorbachev bought abroad; an antique copy of Vanity Fair by Thackeray presented to Raisa by Margaret Thatcher; and a beautifully bound volume of The Kobza-Player by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, whose lines Raisa likes to quote: “My thoughts, my thoughts, what pain you bring! / Why do you rise up at me in such gloomy rows?”

As her own librarian and filing clerk, Raisa takes care to arrange the books properly and not get them mixed up. On their bookshelves there was always a note saying, “Friends—please arrange these alphabetically.”¹²

Raisa also has a large collection of photographs to pack. Among them is one of a deferential party apparatchik handing her a bunch of carnations with an elegant and polite bow. It is Boris Yeltsin. The year was 1985.

Chapter 29 THE INTEGRITY OF THE QUARREL

On New Year’s Eve fewer than 3,000 people turn up in Red Square to lay to rest the corpse of the Soviet Union and welcome the first year of capitalist, independent Russia.

In the crowd there are a considerable number of U.S. citizens, some of them evangelists carrying religious symbols. A line of militiamen stand between a few communists gathered near Lenin’s Mausoleum and a group of jeering Americans.

The midnight chimes ring out from the clock on the Savior Tower, prompting the greatcoated sentinels to goose-step off, jerking their elbows high in the air as always. Fireworks burst in the skies above Red Square, and the small crowd applauds. No members of the government are present to mark the occasion, no church leaders, no dignitaries to say good-bye to seven decades of Bolshevik rule. It is mostly foreigners who are cheering. Even the fireworks are not Russian. They are set off by a German television company to make the occasion a bit more festive for the cameras.¹

In a New Year’s message Yeltsin tells the people of Russia that they have inherited a devastated land, but not to despair. “Life is now hard for all of us,” he says. “Our citizens are at times overwhelmed by a sense of bitterness toward their country. But it is unfair to speak about Russia only in gloomy, deprecatory tones. It is not Russia that has suffered a defeat, but the communist idea, the experiment to which Russia has been subjected.”

It would be more palatable, thinks Chernyaev, if he at least mentions the man to whom he is obliged for being able to speak freely.

Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev see in the New Year at the two-story mansion in the village of Usovo outside Moscow, to which they moved the day after he resigned. Arriving through the gate and seeing the green-roofed house with mustard-colored walls and a weather vane marking the year it was built, 1956, they must feel a sense of déjà vu. This is the same state dacha, Moskva-reka-5, set in a fine wooded estate of one hundred acres, where the Gorbachevs lived for six years, from the time Mikhail Sergeyevich was made candidate member of the Politburo in 1979 until he became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985. When he moved to what is now the presidential mansion later that year, he assigned Moskva-reka-5 to the newly promoted Boris Yeltsin, who was overwhelmed at its palatial rooms and “kitchen big enough to feed an army.”

At first Gorbachev does not go anywhere and hardly meets anyone. “Desperation and hopelessness never overcame me,” he recalls, while admitting that the first few days were very emotional for himself and his family. A former speech writer, the philosopher Alexander Tsipko suggests that Gorbachev retire to his mother’s village in Stavropol and write books. Others recommend that he should become more reserved and transcendental.

President Yeltsin and his family move into Barvikha-4 within hours of the Gorbachevs’ departure. Naina sets about giving it a postrevolution atmosphere by hanging religious icons on the walls, along with the Glazunov portrait of Yeltsin’s mother. Yeltsin likes the presidential dacha so much he takes to staying there on weeknights rather than at the apartment. He delights in its sports hall, tennis courts, children’s playground, dog pound, gardens with ponds and ornamental bridges, and the fenced-off section of the river where he can bathe and fish.