Moscow, December 25, 1991

Gorbachev’s relationship with Alexander Yakovlev breaks down after Yakovlev receives a telephone call from Yeltsin to tell him that the “Stalin Archives” that Gorbachev handed over just before his resignation have yielded up the original of the secret protocols to the notorious 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Europe between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany before World War II. The file contains maps six feet wide signed by Stalin in red and Ribbentrop in blue. Yakovlev has long sought the original documents for his research on Bolshevik crimes, but Gorbachev had assured him they were destroyed in 1950. “Finally, I always believed they would be found,” Yakovlev exclaims. Initials on the file indicate that Gorbachev knew they existed.⁹ This is backed by the claim of Gorbachev’s former chief of staff, Valery Boldin, in a memoir full of bile against his former boss, that he showed the originals to the Soviet leader, who instructed him “not to say anything about it.” The discovery of the secret protocols stuns Yakovlev, and he expresses his reaction to Yeltsin in “a few choice words.”

Other files that Yeltsin releases selectively yield up confirmation that Gorbachev regularly read KGB transcripts of Yakovlev’s private telephone conversations. Feeling betrayed one time too often, Yakovlev leaves the Gorbachev Foundation in 1993 and accepts an offer from Yeltsin to direct Ostankino television. He also sets up his own International Democracy Foundation and publishes a devastating account of terror under Lenin and Stalin, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. From 1996 until his death in 2005 his foundation publishes eightyeight volumes of documents from the Soviet archives.

Yakovlev’s departure creates bad feelings within Gorbachev’s close circle. Chernyaev accuses him of using the foundation’s resources “to circulate myths about himself’ and then, as the winds shifts, deserting Gorbachev for a job with Yeltsin’s government. In his opinion, Yakovlev’s ambition might be forgivable, as he played a key role in destroying the ”Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist lies and demagoguery” that permeated Russia for so many decades, ”but what I can’t forgive is his posturing, at home and abroad, as such a champion of high morality [and] crafting his image as the sole author of perestroika.“¹⁰ Boldin stirs the pot by alleging in his memoir that perestroika and new thinking were in fact ”mainly the work of Yakovlev.”

The relationship between Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, the joint architects of the new world order, also comes to an end. “Gorbachev was my friend. We had warm, close relations,” he tells a reporter in Tbilisi after serving ten years as president of Georgia. “We played an important role together to end the Cold War and reunify Europe. Since then, we went our separate ways. Relations between us grew cold. I cannot say we are friends any longer.”¹¹

George H. W. Bush visits Moscow in his last month as president in January 1993 to sign a historic treaty reducing nuclear stockpiles, the climax of a process that owed everything to Gorbachev and Reagan. Not once did Bush mention Gorbachev by name at the joint press conference with President Yeltsin to mark the event.

Bill Clinton, who takes office as U.S. president some two weeks later, doesn’t know at first what to make of Yeltsin. His advisers warn him that Bush harmed U.S. interests by aligning himself too closely with Gorbachev, and he should avoid making the same mistake with his unpredictable successor. Clinton feels he has no choice but to support Yeltsin, “a proud beggar among the great nations,” as the best hope for democratic reform in Russia.

At their first meeting in Vancouver, Clinton observes Yeltsin downing alcoholic drinks through dinner without touching his food. Stories about the Russian’s mammoth drinking bouts begin to circulate at the highest levels. In Washington in 1993 Clinton is notified of a major security alert when Yeltsin, who is staying in Blair House across from the White House, is encountered by secret service agents in his underwear in Pennsylvania Avenue, trying to hail a taxi to go for a pizza. The next evening, again according to Clinton, Yeltsin is mistaken for an intruder as he drunkenly tries to exit through a basement and comes close to getting short. ¹²

As Yeltsin’s health and insomnia worsen during his first term, he is less able to handle copious quantities of alcohol. On a trip to Germany in 1994 he grabs a baton to drunkenly conduct a brass band in the presence of Chancellor Kohl. During a stopover at Shannon airport in Ireland, he fails to get off his plane to meet the waiting Irish prime minister, Albert Reynolds. According to Korzhakov he is ill and, when not allowed off, sits in his underwear and cries. Naina on another occasion scolds Korzhakov for “making my husband a drunk,” to which Yeltsin’s drinking companion claims he retorted, “No, you brought him from Sverdlovsk an alcoholic!”