Moscow, December 25, 1991

Naina tortures Alexander Korzhakov with complaints that Raisa has taken all the good furniture and replaced it with old stuff, even though the contents manager, housekeeper, and estate manager all confirm that nothing has been removed.

The Russian president also aspires to Gorbachev’s former city apartment on Lenin Hills. Korzhakov drives Boris and Naina Yeltsin there to inspect the sixroom living space from which the Gorbachevs were so rudely evicted on December 25. The flat-roofed apartment block was built to Gorbachev’s instructions in 1985 and betrays his singular lack of architectural taste.² Valery Boldin compared the “grim, dirty-grey concrete structure” to a prefabricated school. The location, nevertheless, is prime. It is set back on a wide boulevard, named after former Soviet prime minister Alexey Kosygin, that skirts the top of a curving wooded embankment high above a U-shaped bend in the Moscow River. The fourthfloor penthouse the Gorbachevs occupied offers a wide panorama of Moscow city, with Novodevichy Convent in the foreground and the Kremlin spires in the distance. At 2,700 square feet, the living space is big even by the standards of the Soviet elite. Korzhakov professes himself shocked by the splendor of the interior. He notes how “the refinement and riches of the quarters of a French queen would pale in comparison with Raisa Maximovna’s boudoir [and] bathroom with Jacuzzi in precious stones, onyx and yashma.” Naina particularly loves the bedroom furniture of fine-grained Karelian birch. She is ready to move in on the spot, but Yeltsin feels it is too much like a museum and that everything is very stiff and formal.

There is something else to consider as well. The Gorbachevs have been moved to a three-room apartment in the same building. The Yeltsins would be living under the same roof with them. Unwilling to risk any contact with their despised adversary, the new first family decides not to occupy the apartment. But they take the luxury furniture and the German kitchen units despite the fact that they were built in and difficult to move.

Yeltsin keeps his old apartment at 54 Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street in downtown Moscow for another three years before he moves his city residence to a new block in Osennyaya Street in the western suburbs. He assigns apartments there to his closest associates, including Yegor Gaidar and Alexander Korzhakov, though these privileged tenants spend most of their time in their own country dachas. They have a collective house warming in 1994 with music supplied by the presidential orchestra. With the foreign currency royalties from his memoirs, Yeltsin later also builds his own three-story dacha in the settlement of Gorki in woods nine miles west of Moscow.

There are other wonderful spoils of office. Yeltsin takes over Gorbachev’s presidential Ilyushin-62 salon-version jet airliner, which he adorns with the word Rossiya (Russia) and the Russian tricolor. Later he trades up to a wide-bodied Ilyushin-96, equipped with an enormous double bed. He also acquires an armorplated BMW imported from Germany. Where he once denounced the perks of the communist leadership, he demands all the trappings of a member of the club of world leaders to which Gorbachev belonged, insisting that his struggle was not against the privileges of the party; “it was against the party’s unbridled, allenveloping power.” His logic is simple: Under communism no one outside the party leadership could aspire to a Zil. In a market economy anyone with the money can drive whatever limousine they can afford, and there is no shame in that.

Yeltsin is also anxious to show off his possession of the nuclear suitcase. He is immensely proud of his nuclear responsibilities. He desires that the colonel-guardians should stand out rather than look inconspicuous as in Gorbachev’s entourage and has a uniform especially designed for them. Everywhere he goes he is accompanied by two officers in black submarine blazers with shoulder boards and gold braid and buttons.