Q: But in the lawsuit regarding the CPSU cash there is talk of abuses and personal enrichment.
A: Exactly. There is talk. There is much rumour-mongering and just plain malicious tittle-tattle around my name. You are welcome to investigate using whatever judicial, undercover or journalistic means you choose: my conscience is clear.
There was an attempt to use the opening of the CPSU archives against me. The new government’s propagandists proclaimed that when they threw open the Central Committee archives they would find there such dirt on Gorbachev as would make the whole world shudder.
And then in March they did. There was a presentation at the Centre for the Preservation of Contemporary Documentation, created on the basis of the archives of the Central Committee. It was announced that more than 160 million documents from the Party archives, ‘reflecting the mechanisms of governance that existed in the USSR prior to August 1991’, would be made accessible to almost anyone interested in reading them. The media reported:
The exhibition organized in connection with the launch displayed minutes stamped ‘Top Secret’ of meetings of the Central Committee’s Politburo, including some dated 1990; the personal files of Party leaders and of such top officials and military leaders as Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgiy Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovsky; the original Party membership and record cards of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Yury Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev and other documents.
What can we add to this report today, after more than 20 years have passed? Many important documents ‘disappeared’ into foreign archives, but to this day no compromising documents against Gorbachev have been found. We talk of something being ‘as difficult as finding a black cat in a dark room’. That is even more difficult if the cat is not there in the first place.
The ‘Trial of the CPSU’
Meanwhile, the situation in the country was developing unpredictably. The reforms were increasingly being implemented in line with the ‘shock therapy’ approach, devised by the International Monetary Fund for countries whose economies were fundamentally different from that of Russia, but accepted by our reformers as virtually a panacea. In some countries the schemes worked, if at a high price, but in Russia implementing them brought about a sudden fall in production and mass impoverishment of the population. One of the consequences of this was increasing friction between the Supreme Soviet of Russia, which until recently had given Yeltsin unconditional support, and the president’s team, who insisted on a ‘resolute’ continuation of shock therapy. In April, these tensions almost boiled over at the Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia.
The hawks among Yeltsin’s supporters and advisers told him he should disperse the Congress. He did not take their advice, and gave a fairly conciliatory speech there, stating after it was over that he had succeeded in rescuing the reform programme. At a press conference in Moscow, I said: ‘If the president had followed the advice he was receiving and dispersed the Congress, the consequences for society would have been tragic.’ On this occasion the worst was avoided, but I found myself increasingly at odds with the policies the government was so aggressively pursuing. At the same press conference, I warned:
Yes, the times call for tough measures, but they cannot be implemented at breakneck speed. Our people were once herded into collectivization, then into industrialization, and now they are being driven into Burbulization. In the past it was all ostensibly done, and is again supposedly being done, for the greater happiness of the people.
I commented that there was a current vogue for resolute politicians, ‘but resolute people alarm me. They could easily wreck everything that has been achieved in the past seven years. It is vital to base policies on what is possible in terms of the actual economic, political and social situation.’
As time passed, however, it became increasingly obvious that the president and his team had decided to race ahead regardless of the consequences. The economy responded to their ‘resolute action’ by collapsing at an accelerating rate, and the life of ordinary people became increasingly hard. This was evident when someone came up with the idea of distracting attention from the rigours of the transition to a free market by ‘putting the Communist Party on trial’.
The occasion was a petition to the Constitutional Court by a group of deputies, former Party officials, asking the court to examine the legality of Yeltsin’s decrees dissolving the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and of the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic]. In response, Oleg Rumyantsev, the secretary of the Constitutional Commission, filed a counter-petition to review the legitimacy of the CPSU itself. The Court decided to consider both matters jointly. Thus began the saga of the Trial of the CPSU, a pernicious enterprise from the outset, which served only to deepen the divisions in Russian society.
In late May, at a meeting between Yeltsin and the representatives he sent to attend sessions of the Constitutional Court (Secretary of State Gennadiy Burbulis, Member of the Supreme Soviet Sergey Shakhrai, and Director of the Intellectual Property Agency Mikhail Fedotov) the idea was proposed of turning the trial of the Communist Party into a ‘new Nuremberg Trial’. This was confirmed the same day by Shakhrai at a press conference. As the Constitutional Court considered the ‘case’, it became clear that those who had instigated it, in fact both sides, were eager to turn the Trial of the CPSU into a Trial of Mikhail Gorbachev.
There could be no two ways about it: this was an attempt to exploit the Russian judicial system to exert pressure and settle scores in a political struggle. There is no need to dwell on the absurdity of the intention of delivering a legal assessment of Soviet history and the constitutionality of the Communist Party. My decision was unequivocal and irrevocable: I would take no part in these antics.
Not everybody understood my reasons, and even some of my colleagues urged me to show respect for the court and find some manner of means for taking part in the ‘trial’. That would have had me playing for both teams at the same time, and moreover, both were equally determined to blame all the country’s ills on Gorbachev in order to exonerate themselves. By this I mean the reactionary wing of the disbanded Communist Party and the extreme radicals in Yeltsin’s entourage. If I allowed them to lead me by the nose, I would only be contributing to a further heightening of social tensions, a splitting of society into opposing camps and diversion of attention away from pressing problems which were snowballing.
The signals emanating from Yeltsin at this time left no doubt as to his intentions towards me: he wanted to humiliate and, at the very least, silence me. On 2 June the president’s press secretary, Vyacheslav Kostikov, issued the following statement:
The utterances of the former president of the USSR have of late been adopting an ever more didactic tone towards the government and the president, and a number of recent statements by Mikhail Gorbachev cannot be interpreted otherwise than as an attempt to heighten political tension, in effect, to destabilize the socio-political situation in the country.
The statement continued that Boris Yeltsin, noting that such utterances by M. Gorbachev were both dangerous and intolerable, would be forced to ‘take the necessary legal steps to ensure that the reform programme was not harmed’.
So that was what was threatening reform in Russia!