Moscow, December 25, 1991

“And what about Krasnodar?” asks Grachev. “Krasnodar is right next door to you, and some incredible things went on there at Medunov’s.” There had been a notorious case of corruption in the Krasnodar region next to Stavropol involving the first secretary, Sergey Medunov, a favorite of Brezhnev’s. “Medunov, he’s something else again,” exclaims Gorbachev. “I read complaints against him myself, especially from the local Jewish population, bribes, extortion, and what orgies in the official dachas! He wasn’t afraid of anything. And for good reason. He had direct access to Brezhnev.”

As general secretary of the Communist Party from 1964 to 1982, Leonid Brezhnev was notorious for his love of expensive gifts and for his failure to investigate allegations of corruption against his most generous donors. After Brezhnev died in 1982, Gorbachev, by then a member of the Politburo, was instrumental in getting Medunov fired, along with corrupt USSR interior minister Nikolay Shchelokov. Gorbachev recalls for his companions that Shchelokov had given the orders to destroy him in retaliation. But it was the interior minister who was destroyed. Shortly after losing his post, Shchelokov was found dead, apparently of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

The Gorbachevs were, however, not above sending presents to Brezhnev themselves, according to Brezhnev’s daughter Galina. Two years earlier she told the Moscow television program Vzglyad that Raisa Gorbacheva gave expensive presents, including a necklace, to the Brezhnev family to win favor for her husband. ⁵ The episode of the program containing Galina’s allegation was banned by Kremlin officials for “aesthetic reasons.” An alcoholic who would end up in a psychiatric hospital, Galina was a suspect witness and had political reasons for discrediting the Gorbachevs. Her husband, Yury Churbanov, was arrested for taking bribes and jailed for six years after a trial that was widely interpreted as a sign from Gorbachev that political corruption would not be tolerated.

As party boss Gorbachev also received gifts, such as the velvet dressing gowns and sable hats pressed on him years earlier by the then Kazakh first secretary Dinmukhamed Kunayev, a Brezhnev loyalist whom Gorbachev subsequently accused of corruption. Some of the most lavish gifts ended up on the third-floor warehouse informally known as Aladdin’s Cave in Old Square, where top party members were required to deposit expensive gifts, though few rarely did, according to Valery Boldin. Gorbachev’s betrayer would later make unverifiable claims in his memoirs about Gorbachev keeping for himself valuable gifts of gold, silver, and platinum.⁶

While Grachev knows there is no serious case for Gorbachev to answer about Stavropol, there is potential embarrassment in the populist charges that Yeltsin has constantly made against him, his love of luxury as head of a supposedly egalitarian society. Even the steadfast Shakhnazarov found grossly offensive the sumptuous holiday dacha that Gorbachev commanded to be built at Foros with state funds for his exclusive use.

They suspect, rightly, that this will diminish as a sensitive issue in direct proportion to Yeltsin’s embrace of the perquisites of power after Gorbachev is gone.

Gorbachev’s aides worry more about what might be found in the files and archives that will fall into the possession of the new authorities. In the last few days they have employed three people, listed in Chernyaev’s diary as Weber, Yermonsky, and Kuvaldin, to cart sacks of paper to rooms they have rented in Razin Street and sift through them for any time bombs. Fearful that they might be locked out of the Kremlin at any time, Gorbachev has had crates of Politburo documents transferred to General Staff headquarters, and Chernyaev has taken some sensitive documents home for safekeeping, despite Grachev’s warning that he shouldn’t “exclude the possibility of a search of your place when they come up with a suit against Gorbachev.” Chernyaev does not believe it will come to that, but he is worried that if things do not go well for Yeltsin, he will have to look for people to blame. “I will be the first candidate as a witness,” he notes in his diary. “However there is nothing criminal or compromising in my archives. But to find something against Mikhail Sergeyevich is possible, especially as he was so frank in personal conversations.”⁷

Gorbachev was made aware of this danger as far back as August 23, the day the apparatchiks were ordered out of the Central Committee building after the collapse of the coup. A distraught senior party official, Valentin Falin, had called Gorbachev to ask him if he was in agreement with the ban just imposed on the Communist Party. When he said he was, Falin had pointed out that the safes of the Central Committee contained documents that were extremely delicate and affected him. Gorbachev replied that he was in an awkward position and could do nothing.