Conor O'Clery - Moscow, December 25, 1991

Yeltsin’s first, and only, formal contact with Gorbachev after December 1991 comes seven years later. In 1999 he sends a telegram of sympathy to the sixty-eight-year-old ex-president as Raisa Gorbacheva lies dying of leukemia in University Hospital in Münster, Germany. “I want to express my deep concern for the ordeal that your family is going through,” he writes. “I know well how hard it is to experience the illness of a loved one. More than ever, in moments like these, mutual support, warmth and caring are needed. I wish for you, my esteemed Mikhail Sergeyevich, strength and perseverance, and, for Raisa Maximovna, courage in her struggle against the disease as well as a speedy recovery.”

Gorbachev shows the telegram to his old friend the Italian journalist Giulietto Chiesa as they stroll in a park near the hospital in Münster. “These are kind words, a very nice gesture,” he remarks. [323] 16 Chiesa, “I Never Lied to Her, I Couldn’t Now.”

The illness of Raisa touches a chord in Russia, especially as she is struck down by a disease with which her charitable work is associated. When Gorbachev asks his staff to approach the new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, for help in getting a passport for Raisa’s sister, Lyudmila, so that she can be available in Germany to become a bone marrow donor for Raisa, Putin’s response is instantaneous.

Gorbachev tears up talking with Chiesa about these acts of kindness. He thought it would take a whole generation before they understood, he says, taking a crumpled cutting from Izvestia out of his pocket and handing it to the Italian. Under the heading “Lady of Dignity” it reads: “Maybe we Russians are becoming people again…. It may only be on this sad occasion, but we are showing great respect for two people who love each other, Raisa and Mikhail. Diminutive and elegant, with sophisticated tastes, Raisa is not like the others. She has been the symbol of a country that wanted to free itself from its dreary grayness. People didn’t understand her, or perhaps they didn’t want to understand her. Maybe too much was asked of them when the couple was in power. But it’s also true that no one was able to bend their will and subdue them.” Raisa cried when she read the article, says Gorbachev.

The transplant cannot be made, and Raisa dies four weeks later, on September 20, 1999, at age sixty-seven. She is buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Yeltsin does not go to the funeral but issues a statement commemorating “a wonderful person, a beautiful woman, a loving wife and mother who is no longer with us.”

Vladimir Polyakov, the ex-president’s press secretary, believes the sympathy for the Gorbachevs has a political as well as a humanitarian side. “People need a certain amount of time to evaluate the past. He [Gorbachev] entered our lives so unexpectedly, and when he left, almost as suddenly, people needed a scapegoat. But if it had not been for Gorbachev, Yeltsin would still be sitting in Sverdlovsk as the regional Communist Party secretary. And if Yeltsin had been elected general secretary of the party in 1985 instead of Gorbachev, no changes would have happened in Russia. Now people are asking for forgiveness for not understanding that before.” [324] 17 Steele, “Russians Say Sorry.”

In November 1996 Yeltsin collapses and has a quintuple heart bypass operation. He is never the same afterwards. On December 31, 1999, he announces that he is leaving the remainder of his presidency in the hands of Vladimir Putin, who has risen from mayor’s aide in St. Petersburg to a senior position on Yeltsin’s staff, then head of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, and finally prime minister, in which role he has promoted a second war against Chechnya. For the first time in history, a Russian leader steps down voluntarily. Yeltsin tells Russians, “I want to beg forgiveness for your dreams that never came true. And also I would like to beg forgiveness not to have justified your hopes.”

His departure from the Kremlin is as low key as Gorbachev’s eight years previously. Yeltsin returns to his office after a farewell lunch at 1 p.m. and presents Putin with the squat fountain pen with which he signed decrees. “Take care of Russia,” he says and leaves the Senate Building for good. [325] 18 Nemtsov, Ispoved Buntarya, 57. Both Yeltsin and Gorbachev are invited to attend Putin’s inauguration as acting president but avoid each other.

On the tenth anniversary of his abdication, Gorbachev’s contempt for the republic leaders who conspired with Yeltsin to break up the Soviet Union remains undiminished. “I was shocked by the treacherous behavior of those people, who cut the country in pieces in order to settle accounts and establish themselves as tsars,” he tells reporters in Moscow on December 25, 2001. He could not oppose them at the time, he says, because that might have led to civil war in a nation brimming with nuclear weapons. “And what is Russia without the Soviet Union? I don’t know. A stump of some sort.”

Asked if he is happy, Gorbachev admits to not knowing what happiness is but remarks that fate allowed him to lead a process of renewal that involved the whole world. “God! What other happiness could there be!”

The former Soviet president meanwhile is embarking on a lucrative new profession as a model for advertising agencies. In December 1997 he appears in an advertisement for Pizza Hut, for which he is paid $150,000. It includes a scene at a café table in which customers argue whether Gorbachev brought freedom or chaos to Russia and concludes with an old woman saying that because of him the pizza topping goes all the way to the edge of the crust, at which all cry out, “Hail, Gorbachev!” [326] 19 Sandle, Gorbachev, 274. Gorbachev cites the need for funds for his foundation as the reason for subjecting himself to this indignity. In 2005 he makes a cameo appearance in the video game series Street Fighter II. In 2007, the man who once possessed the nuclear suitcase allows himself to be used by French fashion house Louis Vuitton to sell their vanity cases around the world. This advertisement, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, shows a pensive Gorbachev in the back of a limousine, a Louis Vuitton bag on the seat beside him, being driven past the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall. The publication poking out of the bag has a barely readable headline in Russian: “The Murder of Litvinenko: They Wanted to Give Up the Suspect for $7,000,” a reference to the poisoning by radioactive isotope of Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko in London the previous year. On his deathbed Litvinenko blamed agents of Putin’s Kremlin. The company’s ad agency Ogilvy & Mather denies trying to convey any subliminal message. The magazine AdWeek describes the Louis Vuitton image as one of the most successful commercial photographs of the decade.

In 2006, the year when both Gorbachev and Yeltsin celebrate their seventyfifth birthdays, they still have not mellowed towards each other. Yeltsin accuses Gorbachev, for the first time openly, of having advance knowledge of the August coup and waiting it out to see who would win. “Yeltsin is a liar; it’s sheer nonsense,” responds Gorbachev.

Boris Yeltsin dies of congestive heart failure on April 23, 2007, at age seventysix. He is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery. Putin, then in the second of two four-year terms as president, declares the day of his funeral a national day of mourning. Mikhail Gorbachev goes to the burial and offers faint praise, extending his condolences “to the family of a man on whose shoulders rested many great deeds for the good of the country and serious mistakes—a tragic fate.” Andrey Kolesnikov, writing in Kommersant, describes seeing Gorbachev downcast and suddenly looking much older. “It was evident that he was suffering in ways that few in the hall were; together with the life of Boris Yeltsin, a piece of his own life had been torn away.”