Moscow, December 25, 1991

Though the power struggle between Russia and the USSR is over, and Gorbachev and Yeltsin will never cross paths again in person, the integrity of their quarrel is undiminished by their new roles in Russian life. Linked forever by history, they are consumed with bitterness over real and imagined slights. Yeltsin ensures that the former Soviet leader becomes persona non grata in Moscow’s official circles. While he is not condemned to the status of nonperson like Khrushchev, Gorbachev nevertheless feels that the press and television under Yeltsin’s “baleful influence” is encouraged to write negative stories about him. While the Gorbachevs are on a two-week vacation in Stavropol after his resignation, Rabochaya Tribuna (Workers’ Tribune) publishes a claim from the Russian procurator that Gorbachev authorized the KGB to spy on Yeltsin during their power struggle and that the discovery of documents proving this in Valery Boldin’s safe explained Yeltsin’s “dubious treatment” in hustling Gorbachev out of the Kremlin.

On returning to Moscow from Stavropol, Gorbachev begins a campaign to reestablish his reputation as a figure of consequence in the world. Anatoly Chernyaev, Georgy Shakhnazarov, and Alexander Yakovlev join him as members of his foundation staff. Palazchenko stays on as his English-language interpreter. Besides establishing his foundation, Gorbachev founds Green Cross, an international organization committed to expediting solutions to environmental problems that transcend national boundaries. One of their first visitors is his old American ally Jim Garrison. “Why didn’t you guys fight back? Why didn’t you have Yeltsin arrested?” Garrison asks Yakovlev. “Jim, let me tell you something about power,” replies Yakovlev. “All my life I have dealt with power, real power, Politburo power. You have it for a time, and then, like sand, you let it slip through your fingers. You leave, and life goes on.”³

Yeltsin monitors the perestroika veterans in his camp for suspicions of divided loyalty. When the head of television, Yegor Yakovlev, tells Yeltsin out of courtesy that he has dined with the Gorbachevs at their dacha, the Russian president replies, according to Yakovlev, “Do you think I don’t know about that!” Then almost plaintively Yeltsin asks, “Why did he invite you to this dinner but not me?” “Are you crazy?” replies Yakovlev. “You are president; he is nothing.” Yeltsin protests, “He never calls me; he never rings me; he never phones.”⁴

This bizarre exchange leads the television chief to conclude that there exists a “savage hatred” of Gorbachev buried deep in Yeltsin’s soul. Yeltsin fires Yakovlev ten months later, after the broadcast of a documentary about ethnic conflict in the Caucasus, which annoys him.

The rivals rushed to bring out self-serving biographies: Mikhail Gorbachev—Memoirs and Boris Yeltsin’s Zapiski Prezidenta (Notes of the President), published in English as The Struggle for Russia. Yeltsin gets a $450,000 advance on royalties compared to Gorbachev’s $800,000.

Three weeks after Gorbachev resigns, James Baker travels around the former Soviet Union on an inspection tour.⁵ His staff carry thousands of dollars in cash to pay for fuel at each airport. His excursion coincides with a short-lived Berlin Airlift—type operation during which, in the space of a week, fifty-four sorties of C-5, C-141, and C-130 transport planes carry a total of thirty-eight million pounds of food and medicine to the newly independent states of the CIS. The State Department ensures that a mercy flight arrives at each airport at the same time as the secretary of state.

In Moscow Baker finds Yeltsin transformed, no longer vague and glib but self assured, well-informed, a master of complex issues.

Facing a presidential election, President Bush, who observed on the last day of the Soviet Union that “we all were winners, East and West,” uses his State of the Union address before both houses of Congress on January 28, 1992, to claim an American victory in the struggle with the Soviet Union. More than five hundred Congress members leap to their feet and give a prolonged standing ovation when he declares, “By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.”

Mikhail Gorbachev is deeply offended. Bush’s triumphalism feeds into the perception, already widespread in Russia, that the former Soviet president is to blame for the loss of their superpower status through kowtowing to the West. If Bush won, then Gorbachev lost. Gorbachev accuses dorogoi George of lapsing into “the old, confrontational way of thinking.”

Later, at the Republican convention in Houston, Bush proclaims that “the Cold War is over, and freedom finished first,” to roars of “USA! USA!” His Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton, mocks Bush’s boast that he defeated communism, comparing it to a rooster claiming credit for the dawn. Clinton goes on to defeat Bush in the fall election.