Moscow, December 25, 1991

Gorbachev pressed on with the reform process. He encouraged the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union to hold their own democratic elections to make their leaders more accountable to the people. Parliaments already existed in each republic, but the poll results were always fixed by the communist bosses, and the legislatures had little power to legislate.

Individual elections for all the republics were scheduled for March 4, 1990. The campaign in Russia was marked by enormous pro-democracy rallies in support of Yeltsin as a candidate for the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies. For the first time prerevolutionary Russian flags and anticommunist slogans appeared among the demonstrators. Fear of the KGB and police was rapidly evaporating. Things had gone too far for repression of political views, especially when the electoral process bore the stamp of party approval.

Over 8,000 candidates stood for 1,068 seats in the Russian congress. Gorbachev joked as he and Raisa cast their ballots that he had set up a party committee at his home to decide whom to support. He also warned reporters that the process had its limits. To split up the Soviet Union would risk the type of chaos that accompanied the Cultural Revolution in China.

Boris Yeltsin ran in Sverdlovsk District Number 74. He advocated an elected president, a multiparty system, and a separate central bank and military units for the Russian republic. As for other republics like Lithuania, which were pressing for secession, let them leave the Union if they wished, he declared. This would weaken the center and give the Russian people a greater ability to decide their own fate. It would also weaken Gorbachev, who commanded the center, an outcome that Yeltsin found equally, if not more, attractive.

Greeted by wildly enthusiastic fans everywhere he went, Yeltsin was elected with 84 percent of the vote in his constituency, defeating eleven other candidates. He had drawn on a deep well of discontent with the failure of communism to feed and clothe its people adequately and on the perception that Russia was exploited by the other fourteen republics, where people lived better lives.

In response, Gorbachev resolved to strengthen and secure his own power. He persuaded the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies to select by secret ballot a president of the Soviet Union for a five-year term—himself, of course—followed by direct nationwide elections for future presidents. Gorbachev got himself selected to the presidency at a special session in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on March 15, 1990, but with only 59 percent support—mainly because of a partial boycott. The narrowness of the vote drew gasps of astonishment. Vitaly Korotich speculated that in the secret ballot many party apparatchiks who paid lip service to perestroika had ganged up with radicals to vote against Gorbachev. The former saw Gorbachev as Allende, the latter as Pinochet.

The day after the vote, Gorbachev returned to the congress and took an oath to the constitution of the USSR at a table flanked by a ten-foot-long red flag with a golden hammer and sickle and a gold-bordered red star in its upper canton, the official emblem of the USSR. He got the briefest of standing ovations and retreated upstairs for a quiet glass of champagne with Raisa and aide Georgy Shakhnazarov. He was now President Gorbachev, head of state, the leader of the party in what was still a one-party state, commander in chief of the armed forces, and the chief executive of one of the world’s two superpowers. He ordered the KGB security service to ensure that in future the red flag be placed in a special floor holder next to him wherever he might be, in the manner of American presidents. He had the words “Sovetsky Soyuz” (Soviet Union) painted on the side of the presidential plane. He set up a presidential council to which he appointed longtime aides, including Valery Boldin, whom he also promoted to chief of staff.⁸

Paradoxically, Gorbachev had less authority than ever. He was tainted now by retaining the leadership of the discredited Communist Party, whose Stalinist institutions were proving allergic to change, and this deepened his unpopularity. He was becoming isolated in a shrinking middle ground. He was even under surveillance from his own secret police, a conclusion reached by Korotich after a bizarre incident in the Kremlin. Gorbachev summoned the editor to his office and threw a tantrum about Ogonyok’s “unfair” coverage of Ligachev, “but as he screamed, his eyes remained calm and benign, and Alexander Yakovlev sat by, grinning.” It was done for show. “I’m convinced he was bugged,” said Korotich, “and that he knew it.”⁹