Then, without warning, on the morning of 7 October the Gorbachev Foundation offices were cordoned off by the police and sealed. The Foundation’s staff were prevented from going in to work. At the entrance a crowd of Moscow and foreign correspondents gathered; for them, the sealing off of the Gorbachev Foundation was a big story.
More and more people were arriving and I was warned over my car telephone that a regiment of mounted police would arrive shortly. I asked for my request that everyone should remain calm and orderly to be passed on. Arriving at the Foundation, I found myself giving an impromptu press conference. I surmised that the decree, effectively confiscating the Foundation’s property, had resulted from my blunt criticism of the president of Russia, and described the government’s action as ostentatious despotism. I suggested that the government was on the verge of paralysis and was trying, by this sort of conduct, to assert its authority.
Speaking about the situation in the country, I said that, having flung Russia into an unregulated market, the government now did not know what to do next. Yes, we needed to adopt market relations, but should do so gradually, taking account of the interests of the bulk of the population. It seemed that now the best way forward would be to form a coalition government.
I talked also about the workings of the Constitutional Court, which had undertaken to consider the ‘case against the CPSU’, even though that was no part of its remit. They had succeeded only in presiding over a political free-for-all, and meanwhile the federation was splitting apart and the economic situation was going from bad to worse.
As later became apparent, the previous day the president of Russia had signed a decree rescinding his own decree of 23 December 1991 and transferring the building and property at the disposal of the Foundation to the beneficial use of the Financial Academy of the Government of the Russian Federation. The Financial Academy was instructed to lease to the Gorbachev Foundation at a price to be agreed premises totalling 800 m2. The Foundation had previously occupied 3,500 m2 in the building.
Negotiations began between officials of the State Property Agency and the Foundation’s managers. The government representatives did eventually agree to allow staff in to collect their work materials and personal belongings.
All this was acted out in front of numerous reporters. Before long, the government representatives were asking the Foundation’s staff to calm the press down and bring some order to the reporting of the outrage, which was already echoing round the world. I and my colleagues did what we could, and stated that the Foundation intended to protest against the government’s abuse of power solely by lawful means. The Foundation issued the following statement:
We strongly protest against the decree of the president of the Russian Federation confiscating the Foundation’s premises, which it occupied in accordance with the instruction of the president himself. This was done as if there were some emergency, without prior notice, let alone consultation, by using the police to barricade the Foundation’s offices. In violation of their labour and civil rights, staff of the Foundation were barred from their workplaces. This is clearly an attempt to prevent the Foundation from carrying on its activities normally, which conform wholly with the requirements of the law and are in the interests of Russia.
A deliberate political attack has been mounted under the guise of resolving accommodation matters. We fully recognize that the scale of the Foundation’s problems cannot be compared with those of Russia, but in the overall context of the country’s development this anti-democratic operation can be interpreted only as an instance of authoritarian tendencies that are increasingly evident in the functioning of the current administration. Tomorrow the same high-handedness may be exercised against any associations or citizen not to the liking of the ruling circles.
We formally declare that the Foundation will continue to work in accordance with its charter and the agreements concluded with Russian and foreign academic and political institutions.
We wish to express our gratitude to all the Russian and foreign organizations and individuals who have demonstrated their solidarity, which we see as an important contribution to the struggle against the violation of democratic principles and for the development of civil society and a society under the rule of law.
My travel ban redounded to the discredit of those who had come up with such an inane idea. On 9 October, our Foundation was visited by the French Ambassador, Pierre Morel. He conveyed to me the sympathy and support of President François Mitterrand, his best wishes for the Foundation’s success and his invitation to visit France at a time of my choosing.
From press reports, we learned that the ‘Gorbachev affair’ had been raised in London at a meeting between the Russian Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev, Prime Minister John Major and the British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. Kozyrev described as an ‘unfortunate coincidence’ the simultaneous ‘temporary moratorium’ on travel abroad of the former USSR president and the government measures taken in respect of the Gorbachev Foundation.
Next, following the death of the former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, his friends and the German government invited me to take part in the funeral of this outstanding political and public figure, with whom I had a long history of friendship and constructive cooperation. Chancellor Helmut Kohl addressed a request to the Russian government to allow me to come to Germany for the funeral. Thereupon, ‘justice over the telephone’ clicked into action, also making it clear who had been behind the ban in the first place.
The president of the Constitutional Court now informed the press that President Boris Yeltsin had requested him to consent to Mikhail Gorbachev’s travelling to Germany to take part in the funeral of ex-Chancellor Willy Brandt. The Constitutional Court, Zorkin went on, had decided it was permissible to hear evidence from Mikhail Gorbachev before his trip abroad in connection with ‘humane considerations’, and after it. This did not mean, Zorkin added, that the Constitutional Court had gone back on its decision to summon Gorbachev to appear in court to testify.
Meanwhile, batches of ‘compromising material on Gorbachev’ continued to be fed to the press. Nothing was off limits: the tragedy of the South Korean passenger plane shot down in the Far East of the USSR in 1983; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979; the August 1991 coup; and, finally, ‘the latest sensation – concealment from the Poles and the world of who was really responsible for the Katyn massacre’. This release was saved up for the final sitting of the Constitutional Court in the trial of the Communist Party and came just as I was attending the farewell for Willy Brandt.
Overlooked was the fact that it was I who, during his visit to Moscow, handed over to President Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland archive documents found by Soviet historians testifying to the fact that Lavrentiy Beria and Vsevolod Merkulov were responsible for the atrocities in the Katyn forest. This was reported in a statement from the TASS news agency of 13 April 1990, where the Soviet side expressed deep regret at the Katyn tragedy, one of the heinous crimes of Stalinism.
When, a few days before leaving the Kremlin, I passed over to Yeltsin the contents of the secret archive of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which contained some 3,000 ‘special folders’, I gave him also the Politburo documents with the signed decisions of Stalin and his immediate entourage on a note from Beria dated March 1940. This had an appendix about the shooting of thousands of Polish prisoners of war. We agreed at that time, in December 1991, that Yeltsin would give these documents to the Poles. I can only guess why he did not do so during the visit to Moscow of President Lech Wałęsa in summer 1992. Perhaps even then he was keeping them back for use in his Nuremberg Trial of the CPSU and Gorbachev.