Moscow, December 25, 1991

Kravchenko denied repeated requests from Yeltsin for air time on state television in the weeks after Vilnius. Every appearance of Yeltsin made Gorbachev crazy, he recalled. “It looked childish, like little boys battling for domination, but it was based of course on the instinctive fear that Yeltsin was acquiring an authority with the people which threatened Gorbachev’s own survival.”

He finally bowed to enormous public pressure and agreed to broadcast a live interview with Yeltsin on February 19. Gorbachev insisted that one of the two interviewers should be Sergey Lomakin, a good-looking young favorite of Raisa. Gorbachev sent Lomakin a list of hostile questions, and Lomakin asked even tougher ones. But Yeltsin managed to create a sensation for the millions of viewers who tuned in across the USSR. He called for the immediate resignation of Gorbachev, who was “lying to the people and was smeared with the blood of ethnic conflicts,” and demanded the transfer of all power to the leaders of the fifteen Soviet republics.

Gorbachev recalled Yeltsin’s behavior with disgust. “His speech teemed with rude and offensive remarks about me,” he complained. “His hands were trembling. He was visibly not in control of himself and laboriously read out a prepared text.” In Washington, Bush watched the Russian leader’s performance on a news report and remarked to his aides in the Oval Office, “This guy Yeltsin is really a wild man, isn’t he!”¹⁰

Despite everything, President Bush and other Western leaders wanted the Soviet Union to stay intact under its current leader. They preferred dealing with the sophisticated and amenable Gorbachev than the unpredictable Yeltsin. Robert Gates, deputy national security adviser and future head of the CIA, who in the early days wrote off Gorbachev as an aberration, now saw him doing “what we wanted done on one major issue after another.”¹¹ With some justification Yeltsin complained that Americans didn’t get it. They saw only one figure in Moscow, and that figure was surrounded by so much foreign euphoria they couldn’t see the truth.

On a second trip to the United States that spring, Yeltsin, with his increased stature as leader of the Russian republic, asked for an official invitation to the White House. Bush hesitated, commenting to Brent Scowcroft that such a step would “drive Gorbachev nuts.” That might be just why Yeltsin wanted it, suggested his national security adviser. “Well that’s also why I don’t want to do it,” replied Bush. They agreed they would see him but would get Congress rather than the White House to issue the official invitation to Washington.¹²

Yeltsin’s call for the resignation of the Soviet president overshadowed Gorbachev’s sixtieth birthday on March 2. He celebrated in the Kremlin with Yazov, who presented him with a saber with inlaid sheath; Pugo, who gave him an inscribed Makarov pistol; and Kryuchkov and others, who sent expensive presents straight to his dacha. Kravchenko arranged for Soviet television to broadcast a sycophantic documentary called Our First President.

The best birthday present he got came from six pro-Gorbachev communist deputies in Yeltsin’s parliament. They secured enough votes to call a special session of the Russian congress for March 28 to have Yeltsin impeached for his television behavior. Gorbachev clutched at this straw. He told Chernyaev, “Boris Nikolayevich is done for; he’s starting to toss and turn; he’s afraid of being held responsible for what he has and hasn’t done for Russia.”

Yeltsin raised the stakes at a vast outdoor assembly in Moscow on March 9 by declaring war on the leadership in the Kremlin, an intemperate remark he withdrew a week later.