Moscow, December 25, 1991

Gorbachev is well aware of his money-raising powers. On a visit to South Korea in April, President Roh Tae-woo proffered, and he accepted, an envelope containing $100,000, an extraordinary act on both their parts at a first meeting. Gorbachev gave the money to his chief of staff, Valery Boldin, for transfer to a children’s hospital.⁷ He knows that after his retirement there will be an avalanche of requests for well-paid appearances and lectures from around the world.

Chernyaev, a war veteran with full moustache under a pudgy nose, feels the indignities of being forced from office as much as Gorbachev. Like his boss, he is also about to become unemployed he believes. The ultimate loyal insider, he sees Gorbachev every day, plying him with memos on personnel and policy matters, sitting in on meetings with foreign leaders and taking notes, free to speak his mind and criticize. Always cheerful, never ruffled, he is the only official whom the very private Gorbachevs have taken regularly to their vacation dacha at Foros on the Black Sea, where he has ghostwritten much of Gorbachev’s books and essays extolling his reforms. The president’s English-language interpreter, Pavel Palazchenko, regards Chernyaev as the unsung hero of perestroika. Chernyaev’s pro-reform views were shaped during three years working in Czechoslovakia, where he saw Soviet tanks turning back the tide of reform in 1968.

Leaving his Kremlin post means losing much more than income for the seventy-year-old Chernyaev. He no longer will have the opportunity to combine family life at his home in Vesnina Street near Moscow University on the city’s western outskirts with visits to his mistress, Lyudmila Pavlovna, who lives conveniently close to the Kremlin in Malaya Gruzinskaya Street. Late in the evening, “having dropped off milk at home and having lied about where I was going,” Chernyaev would regularly hurry off to be with his beloved Lyuda. All he ever wanted, he notes in his diary, was to have a good life.

He sees an irony in the fact that the coming of political freedom for Russia means a loss of his personal freedom to spend time with his lover. “I have to get used to ‘freedom,’” he writes in his diary. “But you can’t be free when you have family…. Would that I had enough strength to spit at everything and go to the woman I love, but the woman would want me always to be cheerful and assured, she would want me to have a good job, she would not want me to be like a dependant, or a poor person who comes for consolation.” He is also wary of competition for his mistress. Alexander Bovin, just dispatched to Israel by Gorbachev as the last Soviet ambassador, also tried to court Lyuda but, writes Chernyaev with satisfaction, “with little success.”

Chernyaev is as licentious as his master is prudish. In 1972 he accompanied Gorbachev, then a young regional party secretary, on a trip to Amsterdam and dragged him to sex shops and into an adult cinema to watch an X-rated movie. Gorbachev “was embarrassed by what he saw, perhaps even revolted.” The future party leader kept tugging his aide’s sleeve and insisted instead on talking about how to fix the problems in Stavropol.⁸

Lyuda is the final passion of the lothario who works with Gorbachev, the last woman who, as he puts it, graciously allows him one-night stands. Several years after leaving the Kremlin, the aging mandarin with high testosterone levels will publish a treatise about his obsession with the opposite sex, called Eternal Woman. In its pages Chernyaev muses among other things about how he could get an erection at some times and at other times not. “Now in the 77th year of life, this [penis] can give up any time,” he ruminates in the book. “And then that’s it. The old man is finished! Lyuda is gone! Love, happiness and the meaning of life all disappear. That’s it! Close the shop!” The publication earns him the title of “Playboy in the Kremlin” in a review by Gennady Gerasimov, published in Sovetskaya Belorussiya.⁹

Yegor Yakovlev (no relation to Alexander Yakovlev) arrives in the Senate Building to help supervise the media coverage of Gorbachev’s resignation address. The former editor of the weekly Moscow News and now head of the state television and radio company, Gosteleradio, Yakovlev has a notorious temper, but around Gorbachev his avuncular face, with arched eyebrows, white hair, and outsize spectacles, is a comforting presence on the final day.

Aware of the historical importance of recording Gorbachev’s last hours as president, Yakovlev has brought veteran Russian writer and filmmaker Igor Belyaev into the Kremlin to make his own documentary alongside the small ABC television crew.