Conor O'Clery - Moscow, December 25, 1991

Yeltsin monitors the perestroika veterans in his camp for suspicions of divided loyalty. When the head of television, Yegor Yakovlev, tells Yeltsin out of courtesy that he has dined with the Gorbachevs at their dacha, the Russian president replies, according to Yakovlev, “Do you think I don’t know about that!” Then almost plaintively Yeltsin asks, “Why did he invite you to this dinner but not me?” “Are you crazy?” replies Yakovlev. “You are president; he is nothing.” Yeltsin protests, “He never calls me; he never rings me; he never phones.” [311] 4 Martin, “Fearful of the Return of a Totalitarian System.”

This bizarre exchange leads the television chief to conclude that there exists a “savage hatred” of Gorbachev buried deep in Yeltsin’s soul. Yeltsin fires Yakovlev ten months later, after the broadcast of a documentary about ethnic conflict in the Caucasus, which annoys him.

The rivals rushed to bring out self-serving biographies: Mikhail Gorbachev—Memoirs and Boris Yeltsin’s Zapiski Prezidenta (Notes of the President), published in English as The Struggle for Russia. Yeltsin gets a $450,000 advance on royalties compared to Gorbachev’s $800,000.

Three weeks after Gorbachev resigns, James Baker travels around the former Soviet Union on an inspection tour. [312] 5 Baker with DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy, 617–618. His staff carry thousands of dollars in cash to pay for fuel at each airport. His excursion coincides with a short-lived Berlin Airlift—type operation during which, in the space of a week, fifty-four sorties of C-5, C-141, and C-130 transport planes carry a total of thirty-eight million pounds of food and medicine to the newly independent states of the CIS. The State Department ensures that a mercy flight arrives at each airport at the same time as the secretary of state.

In Moscow Baker finds Yeltsin transformed, no longer vague and glib but self assured, well-informed, a master of complex issues.

Facing a presidential election, President Bush, who observed on the last day of the Soviet Union that “we all were winners, East and West,” uses his State of the Union address before both houses of Congress on January 28, 1992, to claim an American victory in the struggle with the Soviet Union. More than five hundred Congress members leap to their feet and give a prolonged standing ovation when he declares, “By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.”

Mikhail Gorbachev is deeply offended. Bush’s triumphalism feeds into the perception, already widespread in Russia, that the former Soviet president is to blame for the loss of their superpower status through kowtowing to the West. If Bush won, then Gorbachev lost. Gorbachev accuses dorogoi George of lapsing into “the old, confrontational way of thinking.”

Later, at the Republican convention in Houston, Bush proclaims that “the Cold War is over, and freedom finished first,” to roars of “USA! USA!” His Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton, mocks Bush’s boast that he defeated communism, comparing it to a rooster claiming credit for the dawn. Clinton goes on to defeat Bush in the fall election.

Throughout his retirement Gorbachev consistently argues that the end of the Cold War is not a victory for any one side, as all humankind emerged victorious. The threat of a nuclear holocaust became history, many European nations were given freedom of choice, and the security of Russia was strengthened by the development of more normal international relations. The Western conservative ideologists who claim victory are “simply puffed up with braggadocio.”

In later years the former Soviet leader becomes further disillusioned by NATO’s expansion to Russian borders, and he takes every opportunity to remind Western politicians that, during the negotiations on the unification of Germany, James Baker, Helmut Kohl, Douglas Hurd, and François Mitterrand all gave assurances that NATO would not expand to the East. They had agreed when Eduard Shevardnadze insisted during negotiation on Germany’s future, “Membership of a united Germany in NATO is unacceptable to us.” [313] 6 O’Clery, “Shevardnadze.”

No longer an insurgent fighting for recognition or a pretender fearful of snubs, Yeltsin bombards Western capitals with messages of goodwill and camaraderie. He makes his international debut as undisputed Russian leader in February, flying to London for lunch with Prime Minister John Major. For years afterwards Major enjoys telling of an exchange that showed Yeltsin’s deadpan sense of humor. “I said to him, ‘Boris, tell me in one word: What is the state of Russia?’ He said, ‘Good.’ I was surprised—it was falling to pieces at the time. I said, ‘Tell me in two words.’ He said, ‘Not good.’”

From London, Yeltsin flies on to New York to take formal possession of the Soviet Union’s old seat on the United Nations Security Council. He proceeds next day to Camp David for talks with his new best friend, George Bush. He assures the U.S. president that only he and Marshal Shaposhnikov hold nuclear suitcases and that the control of nuclear weapons has passed into secure hands. Bush gives him a ride in a golf cart and presents him with a pair of hand-stitched cowboy boots with silver engraving for his sixty-first birthday. Yeltsin is so taken with the golf cart that he orders some for his grandchildren to drive around the garden of the presidential dacha in Moscow.

In May, accompanied by Raisa, their daughter, Irina, and interpreter Pavel Palazchenko, Gorbachev also travels to the United States, on a trip cohosted by Ronald Reagan and George Shultz and organized by his American admirer Jim Garrison, and is once more able to drink in the intoxicating brew of celebrity adulation and peer worship so lacking at home. [314] 7 Beschloss and Talbot, At the Highest Levels, 465-468. The wealthy publisher Malcolm Forbes Jr. puts his private jet, named Capitalist Tool, at Gorbachev’s disposal to fly the party around eleven American cities, where they are accommodated in five-star hotels and greeted by fawning hosts, among them Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, and David Rockefeller. Twenty thousand people come to hear Gorbachev speak in Fulton, Missouri, the location of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech. In the New York Stock Exchange the former communist leader is cheered by traders as he declares that “anybody who comes to the Russian market will have the opportunity to extract enormous profits.”

President Bush plans a black-tie dinner for Gorbachev with a triple-A guest list. Word gets back to Yeltsin, and he sends Russian ambassador Vladimir Lukin to the White House to make clear that this will be seen as a personal affront by the Russian president. Bush scraps the formal event in the East Room and instead spirits the Gorbachev party upstairs through the back entrance for a private dinner with the Bush family and James and Susan Baker. Gorbachev doesn’t disappoint with his charm and self-appreciation. “A class act, that guy,” the U.S. president enthuses to Baker after they leave. Gorbachev angers Yeltsin on his return to Moscow by claiming credit for U.S. financial aid that Yeltsin hoped to nail down on a state visit to the United States the following month.

The Russian media largely ignores Gorbachev’s American odyssey. Instead they give blanket coverage to the second visit of President Yeltsin to the United States shortly afterwards. Yeltsin once disapproved of a Russian leader taking a spouse on a foreign trip, but this notion is consigned to a bygone era. He takes Naina with him. Yeltsin earns a tumultuous reception for an address to the Joint Houses of Congress in which he clears the way for American companies to do business in Russia. He concludes his speech on Capitol Hill with the words “Today free and democratic Russia is extending the hand of friendship to the American people.”