Moscow, December 25, 1991

Gorbachev’s knowledge of what was happening in society at this time came principally from his aide, Valery Boldin, who was secretly scheming to subvert his boss. The blandest of bureaucrats, with square face and outsize horn-rimmed spectacles, Boldin wielded great influence over Gorbachev’s diary and routine. Anyone who wanted to see the president had to go through the dogmatic apparatchik whom Gorbachev had recruited from Pravda’s editorial team in 1981. Besides being Gorbachev’s gatekeeper, he was head of the General Department of the Communist Party, which gave him control over archives and documents circulated by the Central Committee. Even Gorbachev’s close aide Anatoly Chernyaev only learned much later that Boldin had a secret information department that supplied Gorbachev with, in Chernyaev’s words, a “tendentious concoction” of negative materials designed to poison him against his pro-reform friends.⁶

Boldin in time would admit that he despised Gorbachev “for his lordly manner and contempt for his subordinates.” He had never forgotten the humiliating way his position had been confirmed six years before, when he was summoned into the presence of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev and told that he had lived up to their expectations. An important party official in his own right, Boldin felt he was treated as a servant. Yet he was so successful at hiding the rancor he felt that Raisa was fooled into thinking he was her loyal ally. She would find out before long how wrong she was. Boldin was unpopular with the president’s staff for his oily attitude towards Gorbachev. Chernyaev never spoke warmly of Boldin, and senior secretariat member Olga Lanina couldn’t stand him. Grachev thought he was obsessed with the power that he wielded. One of Boldin’s quirks was collecting books bound in fine-tooled leather that exposed convoluted Masonic conspiracies favored by right-wing extremists. But Boldin lived up to his Bolshevik ideals. He refused the perks of his status, declining a Chaika, access to a special clinic, and a larger dacha, and was contemptuous of the Gorbachevs’ taste for the lavish benefits of office.

The alarmist information that Boldin fed his master came from KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, a sixty-seven-year-old admirer of Stalin who was also posing as a reformer. The short, baby-faced Kryuchkov, nicknamed Cherub by his staff, was a conspiracy theorist with a taste for Chivas Regal who wore a cardigan under his jacket and looked more like a college professor than a Soviet spymaster. Operating from a cavernous oak-paneled office on the fourth floor of the KGB building, with a portrait of Gorbachev on the wall, he produced a stream of reports claiming that Western intelligence agencies were intent on the destruction of the Soviet Union as a great power. Kryuchkov’s agents tapped the telephones of the leading reformers, including Yeltsin and Alexander Yakovlev, and provided the transcripts, via Boldin, to their most avid reader—Gorbachev. Every day the Soviet president would go through hundreds of pages of these reports compiled secretly on his closest colleagues.

On December 11, 1990, in a chilling throwback to darker days, the head of the KGB appeared on the main evening television news to warn, “at the president’s request,” that the pro-democracy movements in the republics were the creatures of foreign money and intelligence and that “we in the security forces have made our choice: we stand for the flowering of our socialist homeland.”

A horrified Eduard Shevardnadze thought Kryuchkov’s rhetoric smacked of the 1930s. It seemed to Palazchenko that the hawks wanted to welcome Gorbachev back as a prodigal son who had sown his wild oats and was now returning to the fold. It was evident to Chernyaev that his boss had reached the limit of his reform capacity and was retreating, confused, before an onslaught of the reactionaries. He found it sad to see Gorbachev swaggering and acting superior. He and Alexander Yakovlev listened together on radio one day as Gorbachev made a “disastrous” speech to the Supreme Soviet. Yakovlev muttered in some distress, “He’s done for, now I’m sure of it.” Gorbachev, as Russian journalist Leonid Nikitinsky put it, had looked back at the Central Committee and turned into a pillar of salt.

The Soviet leader abruptly dissolved his presidential council, rather than heed its more progressive members. As a gesture to his old comrade, he kept Alexander Yakovlev on as a special adviser, though he cut him out of decision making. Kryuchkov and Boldin had partly succeeded in poisoning Gorbachev against Yakovlev. Together they came to Gorbachev’s office to warn the incredulous president that the former ambassador to Canada was in reality an agent of the CIA.